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CHRISTIANITY AND 
MODERNISM 


BY 


FRANCIS J. HALL, D.D. 


PROFESSOR OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY IN THE GENERAL 
THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW YORK 


“The Truth Shall Make You Free’’ 





NEW YORK 


EDWIN S. GORHAM 
11 WEST 45TH STREET 


1924 


COPYRIGHT 
BY 
EDWIN S. GORHAM 
1924 


THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS 
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK 


DEDICATED 
To THE MEMORY OF THE FAITHFUL 
OF ALL THE AGES 


- Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


httos://archive.org/details/christianitymode0Ohall 


PREFACE 


In his recently published little volume, What is 
Modernism? Dr. Leighton Parks has given a de- 
scription of that movement, of its aims and of its 
arguments in matters now under controversy, which 
is gravely misleading, although unintentionally so, 
Iam sure. He does not appear to have grasped the 
fundamentally anti-evangelical standpoint and an- 
imus of the Modernist movement; and just because 
his own spirit and motives are transparently loyal, 
his book, charmingly written, is likely to deceive 
those of his readers who are not sufficiently and 
correctly informed. The book seems to require a 
reply: and I have been urged to make such reply by 
responsible persons whose judgment I respect. 

Partly in direct terms, and partly by incidental 
statements and allusions, Dr. Parks raises many 
questions, and to deal with them all in detail se- 
riatim would require a very large volume—a weari- 
some one for the readers who ought to be reached. 
Moreover, as I shall explain in due course, the 
battle is really due to standpoints, to mutually in- 


compatible presuppositions and outlooks. When 
Vv 


v1 PREFACE 


these are adequately understood, many of Dr. Parks’ 
questions answer themselves, and the rest become 
easier to handle. Again, I am unwilling to embark 
in the personal controversy with Dr. Parks which 
might be involved in discussing the details of his 
book. I have much respect for his personal char- 
acter and motives, and I believe him to be loyal 
hearted. 

I prefer, therefore, not to make my book a reply 
to his, but to adopt a method which I believe will be 
both more helpful to my readers—that of explain- 
ing genetically and fundamentally the real origin, 
presuppositions and aims of Modernism, with so 
much attention to the specific issues raised by the 
movement as the recent outburst seems to call for. 
In pursuing this method I shall incidentally be meet- 
ing what is really significant in the contentions not 
only of Dr. Parks but of several other recent writers 
in this Church.* 

The subject is of course complex, and I cannot 
hope that every part of my book will be easy read- 
ing. I have striven, however, to be as clear as I 
can; for I wish to reach all classes of intelligent 
readers, lay as well as clerical, who are fair-minded, 
and are willing to study the conservative as well as 


1For example: Bishop William Lawrence, Fifty Years; 
IK. S$. Drown, The Creative Christ; Seven Professors of 
Cambridge, Creeds and Loyalty; Frederic Palmer, The V irgin 
Birth; ete. 


PREFACE vil 


the Modernist position. I have also aimed to avoid 
invidious personalities and other faults of temper 
associated with what is called the odium theologicum. 
But I ask my readers not to confuse earnest con- 
tention for the faith with such faults. The faith 
is that by which we live, and its earnest defence is 
a branch of Christian duty. 

It is easy for insufficiently informed Christians 
to infer that, because Modernists argue very ag- 
gressively, for open-mindedness, and interpret their 
movement as a reaction against the “closed mind,” 
therefore they are peculiarly open-minded. But 
open-mindedness here should mean sympathetic 
readiness to take pains to understand both sides of 
the controversy. One who takes Modernist de- 
scriptions of the conservative position as final is 
not doing this. He is hearing only one side, and 
is resting in caricature. The mind thus closed 1s 
not only misled. It is unfair to historical Christian- 
ity. And the truth of what I am saying is not at 
all reduced when I acknowledge the undeniable fact 
that victims of the closed mind are also to be found 
among conservatives. To determine the relative 
number of such victims in the mutually opposed 
groups, however, is a hopeless and entirely useless 
task. My point is that, if Modernists are sincerely 
desirous to be open-minded, they cannot fulfil their 
desire until they study the conservative position 


Vill PREFACE 


more seriously than they have hitherto given ev- 
idence of doing. 

Apart from details discussed in this book, three 
outstanding reasons may be mentioned as justifying 
the alarm felt because’of the Modernist propaganda 
within the Church. 3 

(a) The first is the truly anti-Christian and sub- 
versive nature of the presuppositions which control 
the Modernist argument. Even those professed 
Modernists who would reject them in any clearly 
stated form, are employing methods of argument 
which have no validity and no discoverable basis 
except that of the naturalistic philosophy and a re- 
duced conception of Christ’s Person. Modernism 
calls itself a mental attitude rather than a doctrine, 
but its presuppositions necessarily make it hostile to 
several central doctrines of the historic Christian 
faith, A papal pronouncement describes Modern- 
ism as “the synthesis of all heresies.” This is mis- 
leading, for some professed Modernists appear to 
retain the chief articles of the faith. But in retain- 
ing them, they are inconsistent, and occupy what 
can only be regarded as an unstable position. The 
Modernist premises do not admit of acceptance of 
the supernatural elements of Church doctrine at all. 
In short, whatever else may be said of it, real 
Modernism is not in line with Christianity. So far 
as it is religious, it is a new religion. 


PREFACE 1X 


(b) A second reason is the visible hostility of 
Modernists to the Church’s propaganda, and their 
open attempt to break down the ecclesiastical pro- 
visions for its maintenance. Heresy is being glo- 
tified, and defence of the “given” faith is crudely 
identified with a “closed mind.’ The Church is 
charged with heresy-hunting—a grotesque accusa- 
tion in view of recent history. The aim in view 
appears to be not simply to promote wise discretion 
in discipline, but to make it impossible for the 
Church to employ any discipline with reference to 
clerical departures from the creeds, however glaring 
and defiant. 

(c) A third reason is the result of the Modern- 
ist propaganda on the minds of simple folk, the 
untrained masses. A _ rationalistic scholarship is 
made a substitute for the Church’s witness to the 
revealed faith; and the pretentiousness and skilful 
publicity of Modernist orators and writers is cal- 
culated completely to deceive, at least to unsettle, 
those who through lack of intellectual training and 
competence are inclined to be convinced by the loud- 
est voices. And Modernist voices are very loud— 
the newspapers repeat and “amplify” ‘what is most 
novel and subversive, ignoring orthodox utterances 
as not constituting ‘‘news.’’ It is very sad indeed; 
and the certainty that Modernism will be short-lived, 
viving way to some new movement, does not alter 


x PREFACE 


the gravity of the situation. The Church, indeed, 
has “chronic vitality,” and will survive with un- 
changed faith this onslaught, as it has survived its 
predecessors. None the less, it is by the agency of 
its loyal defenders that the Holy Spirit saves the 
Church from each successive attack, whether from 
without or from within. 

I have tried to make my footnotes and references 
as brief and as few as possible, for my aim is con- 
structive and defensive rather than academic. 
Scholarly annotating would also distract many of 
those whom I hope to reach. This, along with my 
desire to avoid personal controversy, will explain 
why I have not more frequently given specific ref- 
erences to the writers whose arguments I am answer- 
ing in given cases. 

I wish gratefully to acknowledge valuable sug- 
gestions in details from Professors Edmunds and 
Easton of the General Seminary and Dr. S. P. 
Delany. They are, of course, not responsible for 
- the use I have made of their help. 


I 


CHAPTER 


I, 


Ly, 


III. 
LV; 


CONTENTS 


PREFACE . 


THE RISE OF THE MODERN MIND . 


1. The Ancient Mind . 

2. Seeds of Trouble . 

3. The Anglican Mind . 

4. Modern Factors .. 

5. The Resulting Modern Mind 


THE BATTLE OF STANDPOINTS . 


. The Parties Involved 

. Protestant Liberalism 

. Fundamentalism : 
. Ecclesiastical Modernism : 
. Conservatism . 

. Opposed Presuppositions 


Om Bow bd 4 


THE CASE oF “EVERYMAN” 


RECENT EVENTS 


1. The Attack ‘ 
2. The Resulting Reaction . 
aenuneehastoral., 

4. Modernist Rejoinders 

5. Conservative Action . 


THE Issues RAISED 


1. Preliminary Issues 
2. Issues as to the Creed 


3. Specific Doctrinal Issues . 
X1 


X1i 


CHAPTER 


MLS 


VIII. 


1, 


Dai 


CONTENTS 


CRITICISMS OF THE PASTORAL . 


1. Its Canonical Regularity 
2. Its Language . 
3. lwo of Its Assertions 


NATURAL SCIENCE AND THE CREEDS . 


. Scientific Results Helpful to Faith 
. The Limits of Natural Science . 

. Naturalism is not Science 

. The Attack on Miracles . 


Om BO Db & 


. Tests of Credibility . 


BIBLICAL CRITICISM 


1. The Nature and Origin of ie Bible 
2. The Growth of Bibliolatry . : 
3. Biblical Criticism and Its Results . 
4. Critical Blunders . PAR 


FAITH AND SCHOLARSHIP 


1a Paith and thewHaith ay fh 
2. The Part of Christian Scholarship . 
3. The Present State of Scholarship . 


FAITH AND FREEDOM 


1. Mutually Interacting Principles 
2. Responsibility . : 
3. Freedom 


ECCLESIASTICAL RESPONSIBILITY . 
. Bases of Argument . 
. Conditions of Membership . 


. Ministerial Requirements 
. Clerical Discipline 


wD db 4 


. The Real Meaning and Place of Miracles 


. Propagandist Function of the Church . 


CHAPTER 


SLIT. 


XIV. 


XV. 


XVI. 


CONTENTS 


THE CATHOLIC CREEDS . 


1. Modernist View of Them 
2. Their Development . 
- Their Purpose : 

. some Characteristic Aspects 


INTERPRETATION OF THE CREEDS . 


1. The Modernist Plea . 

2. Fixed and Progressive Interpretation 
3. Symbolical Interpretation 

4. Unchanged Meaning of the Creed . 


THE FULL GODHEAD OF CHRIST 


1. The Nicene Doctrine A 
2. Anticipated in the New Testament . 
3. “Different Gates to One Faith” 


THE VirGIN BirTH . 


1. Standpoints 

2. state of the Question 
3. The Evidence 

4. Objections 

5. Importance 


Tur Bopity RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 


1. The Christian Doctrine . 
2. Modern Reaction . 
3. Matter and Spirit 


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CHAPTER I 
THE RISE OF THE MODERN MIND 
1. The Ancient Mind 


Tue first Christians are described as continuing 
“stedfastly in the Apostles’ doctrine and fellow- 
ship, and in the breaking of bread, and in the pray- 
ers.”1 They were certain that they had received 
from Christ and His Holy Spirit a body of saving 
truths and an authoritative ecclesiastical society and 
sacramental machinery for preserving and propagat- 
ing these truths and for practically applying them 
to the overcoming of sin and the attainment of eter- 
nal life with God. They had their problems, but 
these were practical rather than theoretical. And 
they were not truth-seekers so much as converted 
to the truth, which they were confident they had re- 
ceived once for all. And they were certain that the 
truths, institutions and precepts which they had re- 
ceived were permanently valid, adaptable to all man- 
kind, and not open to substantial change to the end 
of time. Their corporate worship was the Holy 


1 Acts ii, 42. 
z 


2 RISE OF THE MODERN MIND 


Eucharist, around which all their religious life was 
organized. 

In the patristic age, the primitive faith had to 
be translated into the terms of gentilic, especially 
Greek, thought; and in thus translating certain 
Christian teachers made substantial changes in this 
faith. The Church was therefore forced to protect 
the faithful by authoritative definitions, especially 
in connection with the Person of ‘Christ and its 
trinitarian background. As an outcome of this pro- . 
cess, the original “form of sound words,” ? prob- 
ably based upon the baptismal formula, was 
developed into various local creeds, and these in 
turn into the so-called Apostles” and Nicene creeds. 
These two creeds were generally accepted as cor- 
rectly defining certainties that had been handed 
down from the Apostles in all the Churches, and on 
this ground have been retained by a vast majority 
of Christians to the present day. What is called 
“the modern mind,” being a novelty, has gained 
impressive publicity. It constitutes “news.” But 
it should not bé confused with the mind of modern 
Christians in general, of the silent majority. This 
mind, even when accepting the assured results of 
natural science and biblical criticism, is fundamen- 
tally conservative; and, as I hope to show in this 
book, it is in no danger of overthrow. 


211 Tim. i, 13. 


SEEDS OF TROUBLE 3 


2. Seeds of Trouble 


While the ancient faith has always stood sure 
for the faithful and devout within the Catholic 
Churches, and is quite the most self-coherent and 
vital factor in the modern Christian situation, seeds 
of trouble began to be sown at an early date. These 
consisted partly of human additions to the faith and 
partly of practical abuses and corruptions. 

(a) In no age can men believe the doctrines of 
the Christian creed without putting them into the 
mental context of their existing knowledge, real 
or fancied, and their opinions, on other subjects. 
Moreover, the boundary line between these doc- 
trines and this wider context is certain to become 
faint, and articles of the faith come to be under- 
stood popularly as including what are really ex- 
traneous human ideas and inferences. With the 
growth of scientific knowledge, however, many of 
these ideas are abandoned by educated men, and 
there emerges an appearance of contradiction be- 
tween the ancient Christian creed and science. But 
careful study shows that this appearance is mislead- 
ing, and that the contradiction is really between old 
and new science—the old science having been mis- 
takenly treated as part of the ancient creed. Such 
is the true explanation of the so-called warfare be- 
tween science and religion that began late in the 


4 RISE OF THE MODERN MIND 


middle ages. This warfare has sloughed off many 
theological opinions; but, as I hope to show, it has 
left the ancient faith standing in its original in- 
tegrity. In the meantime, however, many souls 
have been confused and led away from the faith. 

(b) The abuses and corruptions which caused 
the Protestant revolution of the sixteenth century be- 
gan their perceptible growth in the fourth century, 
when the Church came to be patronized by the state 
and great throngs of half converted and unconverted 
pagans flocked into its membership. Civil powers 
and responsibilities and much wealth came to the 
episcopal hierarchy, and secular ambition gradually 
corrupted the ecclesiastical administration. The 
outcome in the Western Church was the develop- 
ment of the medizeval papal system, having its cen- 
tre in Rome and self-defensively opposed to reform. 

The need of reformation was intensified by the 
invasion of pagan ideas and practices that naturally 
resulted from the wholesale method of admission 
into the Church, above mentioned. The Church’s 
missionaries did, indeed, try to impart Christian 
meanings to these new elements, but with very im- 
perfect success. Thus it came to pass that, while 
the ancient Catholic system remained in its integrity, 


3 The idea of hunting up pagan ritual for the improvement 
of Christian practice was, of course, quite unknown until 
recently. 


THE ANGLICAN MIND 5 


it had become encrusted with alien elements that 
seriously reduced its spiritual power. 

In the fifteenth century, earnest efforts were 
made to bring about reformation of the Church in 
head and members. These efforts were defeated 
by the Papal See, and many became convinced that 
revolt from papal jurisdiction was the only possible 
method of reformation. This revolt came in the 
sixteenth century. Except in the English Church, 
it resulted in a revolution that involved repudiation 
of Catholic authority and of vital elements in the 
Catholic system, erection of the Bible as the sole 
source and rule of the faith, and assertion of the 
supremacy of enlightened private judgment in in- 
terpreting Scripture. 


3. The Anglican Mind 


On the other hand, the English Church adhered to 
the aim of mere reformation, upon the avowed basis 
of appeal to Catholic antiquity. Its leaders had 
imperfect knowledge of this antiquity, and their op- 
position to whatever they thought—not always truly 
—to be distinctively Roman has left important traces 
in Anglicanism, But under providential overruling 
the English Church retained, and transmitted to its 
daughter Churches, the essential elements of the an- 
cient Catholic system—the creeds, ministry, liturgy, 


6 RISE OF THE MODERN MIND 


and sacramental system and discipline. Its implicit 
rule of faith is to receive the teaching of the Church 
as illustrated and confirmed by the Scriptures. The 
Bible is accepted as the Word of God, and as con- 
taining all necessary doctrine; but the Church is ac- 
knowledged to have authority in controversies of 
faith, and in this relation, therefore, to be the in- 
terpreter of Scripture. Accordingly, the persua- 
sion which is required of those who would become 
official ministers of the Church’s propaganda is that 
its prescribed doctrines and creed are susceptible 
of confirmation by Scripture, and are faithfully to 
be taught to the congregation. 

It should be clear that the consequent mind of this 
Church, its official mind, is found neither in passing 
movements nor in the opinions of momentary lead- 
ers. It is given in what the Church abidingly pre- 
scribes in its Book of Common Prayer, and in the 
provable implications of these prescriptions.* 


4. Modern Factors 


The Protestant Revolution has had effects of far- 
reaching nature, unforeseen by its promoters. And 
either directly or indirectly the causes or historic 


4T have treated more fully of the Anglican mind in Introd. 
to Dogm. Theol., ch. vii; and Authority, Eccles. and Biblical, 
pp. 143-140, where refs. are given. 


MODERN FACTORS ve 


factors that explain what is called “the modern 
mind” can be traced back to it.° 

(a) Protestant Bibliolairy. As I shall show in 
a later chapter, while the ancient Church canonized 
Holy Scripture as the Word of God, and appealed to 
the Bible for confirmation and illustration of its own 
teaching, it did not treat Scripture as the source of 
the faith, nor did it give official sanction to theories 
concerning the inspiration of the sacred writers. 
Many came to infer from their inspiration that 
these writers were wholly inerrant, but this was not 
ecumenical doctrine.6 The new Protestant ortho- 
doxy, however, linked together this belief in biblical 
inerrancy with the contention that the Bible is the 
sole source and rule of the faith. This naturally en- 
hanced the unsettling effect of the subsequent dis- 
proof by science and biblical criticism of the iner- 
rancy of biblical writers. 

(b) The supremacy of private judgment in the 
interpretation of Scripture, as against ecclesiastical 
authority, a onesided exaggeration of previously 
neglected truth, while it became in part an emanci- 
pating factor fruitful in intellectual progress, also 
set free a destructive individualism. It increased 


5A. C. McGiffert, in The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas, 
gives an illuminating account of these factors from the Liberal 


standpoint. 
6 Although emerging in Roman discipline and recent papal 
pronouncements. Cf. Galileo. 


8 RISE OF THE MODERN MIND 


the loss of the common Christian mind inculcated in 
the New Testament, and has had destructive effect 
upon Protestant orthodoxy. 

(c) Multiplied Confessions of Faith. Their im- 
position was logically inconsistent with the Prot- 
estant conception of private judgment, but repre- 
sented a surviving remnant of belief in the need 
of corporate witness. None the less, these confes- 
sions were mutually discordant in important articles ; 
and the result of their imposition was to produce a 
babel of rival dogmas which has had destructive 
effect upon the authority of all doctrinal formula- 
ries and creeds. | 

(d) Natural science has attained to no results 
that are inconsistent with the substance of the an- 
cient Catholic faith. But its overthrow of certain 
ancient conceptions of nature which, as I have 
already shown, materially affected the popular un- 
derstanding of certain Christian doctrines, has 
seemed to many to make uncertain the validity 
of ancient doctrine in general. And this applies 
in particular to the conceptions of creation sup- 
posed by Protestant orthodoxy to be involved 
in acceptance of the Bible as the Word of God. 
Beside all this, the successes of natural science, and 
the vast enlargement of knowledge of the visible 
order which it has achieved, have upset the men- 
tal perspectives of many. The necessary limita- 


MODERN FACTORS 9 


tions of science have been overlooked; and the 
thoroughly unscientific philosophy of naturalism has 
created, even in those who disclaim acceptance of it, 
a form of thought or mental temper which is often 
fatal to belief in the supernatural and miraculous. 
The effect of this on men’s acceptance of the Catho- 
lic creeds is of course destructive. I shall enlarge 
upon this later. 

(e) Biblical criticism, especially during the past 
century, has been productive of results of great 
value, and has incidentally discredited completely the 
inference of Protestant orthodoxy that because the 
Bible is the Word of God it is therefore an inerrant 
source of final information on all subjects of which 
it speaks. Biblical criticism has also brought into 
clear relief the uneven spiritual quality of Scripture, 
the necessity of applying the historical method to its 
interpretation, and its unsuitability to be the sole 
source and rule of the faith. These results are 
gradually helping believers to use the Bible more 1n- 
telligently and more effectively for its divinely in- 
tended purpose. But many biblical critics have been 
controlled by rationalistic and naturalistic presup- 
positions, and this has led them to destructive con- 
clusions which are vitiated by their premises. Ac- 
cordingly, their efforts to eliminate the supernatural 
from the Gospel narratives have overreached and 
defeated themselves in the judgment of an increas- 


10 RISE OF THE MODERN MIND 


ing number of sane critics. None the less the pre- 
tentious claims and evident skill of negative criticism 
have had influence in unsettling many Christian 
minds. 

(f) The study of comparative religion has also 
been helpful when sanely pursued—especially in 
proving the hidden guidance of God vouchsafed to 
the heathen world, on the one hand, and the supreme 
truth and finality for all of Christianity, on the 
other hand. But like biblical criticism it has been 
exploited rationalistically, with the result that the 
discovery of measures of truth in every religion has 
been thought by many to weaken the exclusive claims 
of Christianity—its supernatural basis, unique au- 
thority and finality. 

(g) Critical Philosophy, initiated by Descartes 
and developed by Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, 
Hamilton, Mansel, Spencer and others, has im- 
pugned the trustworthiness of the human mind as 
an instrument of knowledge of the divine. Anda 
distinctly sceptical element is to be found in many 
recent Protestant writers, notably in the Ritschlian 
view that religious doctrines are judgments of 
value rather than of objective truth. 

A significant outcome has been a considerable 
abandonment of concern about the other world, and 
the substitution of a species of utilitarian idealism, 


RESULTING MODERN MIND 11 


having exclusive reference to human interests. To 
make this world a decent and comfortable place to 
live in, and unselfishly to promote the individual and 
social happiness and welfare of men here and now, 
this, or something like it, is being proclaimed as 
real Christianity and real religion.? We hear it 
said that the Church, with its creeds and _ sacra- 
ments, has failed; and that there is more religion 
outside the Churches than within them. 


5. The Resulting Modern Mind 


The mixed state of mind or mental attitude that 
has gradually developed among those who have been 
controlled by the factors above summarized is what 
is meant by the current phrase “the modern mind.” 
It is not a doctrine but a mental attitude and out- 
look. It has doctrinal effect, but of the negative 
kind. That is denials of traditional doctrine are 
congenial to it. It is sometimes loud in demanding 
reconstruction; but does not construct—certainly not 
on lines that engage consent. 

Its victims, many of them, are notably honest, 
sincere and scholarly truth-seekers, but often seem 
unhappily to substitute the exercise of seeking for 


71I have discussed this fully in “This Miserable and Naughty 
World,” in Anglican Theol. Review, Oct. 1920. 


12 RISE OF THE MODERN MIND 


finding and accepting. In fact, they are very apt 
to regard any one’s assurance of having found truth 
as evidence of narrowness—of “the closed mind.” 

Its leading forms will be exhibited in the next 


chapter. 


CHAPTER II 
THE BATTLE OF STANDPOINTS 
1. The Parties Involved 


THE religious scholarship of our time is divided 
into mutually opposed schools; and the consensus of 
experts is confined to matters which, important as 
they are for sound learning, do not affect the truth 
of the ancient Catholic creeds. Those whose knowl- 
edge of current scholarship is derived from the loud- 
est voices and from the newspapers are misled in 
this matter. They gain the impression that real 
scholars are now agreed in this at least, that the 
traditional faith of the creeds requires important 
modification, if it is to be harmonized with modern 
knowledge. 

The purpose of this book is to show that this is 
not the case. The fact is that “Liberal” and 
“Modernist” scholars are disagreed positively and 
combatively in important regards. Their concord is 
confined to matters lying outside Christian funda- 
mentals, and to an outlook that induces in them a 
“closed mind’? towards traditional doctrine, es- 
pecially towards its supernatural elements. 

13 


14 THE BATTLE OF STANDPOINTS 


Many people assume that expert scholarship must 
in the long run reach common and assured results 
in matters of religious doctrine. For reasons to be 
discussed later, this.is not the case. It is sufficient 
for the present to say, that scholarship, even at its 
best, is determined in its conclusions by its original 
assumptions or presuppositions, and these presuppo- 
sitions are peculiarly difficult to change in religious 
enquiry. Furthermore, success in religious truth- 
seeking is controlled by the law that spiritual things 
are spiritually examined; + and scholarly expertness 
is incompetent in this examination, unless the scholar 
has been converted, and has humbly submitted to 
the laws of enlightenment by grace. 

I am convinced of the scholarly acumen of many 
Liberals and Modernists. I also have come to know 
that traditional doctrine is accepted and defended by 
a vast array of competent scholars; and I am not 
disturbed in this knowledge either by assertions to 
the contrary or by the fact, already explained, that 
scholarship of the traditional type fails to gain the 
publicity which is secured by that of the innovating 
kind. These two scholarships disagree vitally in 
their results ; and the most visible cause of this is an 
opposition of original presuppositions and stand- 
points. 

In brief, the present controversy is not correctly 


1]T Cor. ti, 11-14. 


PROTESTANT LIBERALISM 15 


described as between scholarly and unscholarly 
groups, but as a battle of standpoints. In Protestant 
bodies the standpoints involved are those of Liberal- 
ism and Fundamentalism. Within Catholic com- 
munions, including our own, the battle lies between 
the standpoints of Modernism and Catholic conserv- 
atism, Modernism being in some ways akin to 
Liberalism, but in important regards quite distinct. 
Much confusion has arisen in America from failure 
to distinguish these standpoints and to perceive that 
there are two battles going on, not one only. 


2. Protestant Liberalism 


Protestant Liberalism ? owes its development and 
principles chiefly to German rationalism. It reflects 
the influence of Kant’s critical philosophy, of ra- 
tionalistic and negative biblical criticism, of Schleier- 
macher’s emphasis on experience, and of the 
Ritschlian view that the validity of religious doc- 
trines lies in their being judgments of value. 
Christ, Ritschl said, has the value of God for our 
religious consciousness; but whether He is actually 
pre-existent God, we cannot know. Its current 
form is chiefly due to the work of Adolf Harnack 
of Berlin.® 


2 Carefully described by 0) Quick, Liberalism, Modern- 
ism and Tradition, Lec. i. 
3 Cf. his What is Christiamty? 


16 THE BATTLE OF STANDPOINTS 


In its full development private judgment gains 
complete sway, as against both biblical and ecclesi- 
astical authority. ‘There is no rule of faith except 
that of experience and unfettered scientific scholar- 
ship. The Bible, as reduced by negative criticism, 
contains records of genuine experience which call 
for careful study by the historical method, but this 
experience has now been transcended. Science is 
supreme, and the miraculous does not happen. The 
Kingdom of God is earthly human society, pro- 
gressively moralized on the lines of efficient utilita- 
rian idealism. 

Acknowledging that the essentials of Catholicism 
are found in St. Paul, Harnack rejects them, and 
harks “back to the historical Jesus,’ by which he 
means the Jesus of an emasculated and naturalistic 
version of the Synoptic Gospels, to the exclusion 
of both apostolic Christianity and Old Testament 
prophecy. On this basis he makes the essence of 
Christianity to be an ethic, grounded in the father- 
hood of God and the brotherhood of man, and issu- 
ing in development in this world of the Kingdom 
of God, in the sense above indicated. The Christ 
of traditional dogma is rejected. Hrs divinity is 
admitted in terms, but the meaning is that the god- 
likeness, which is potential in all men, is most per- 
fectly realized in Him. His Godhead is purely 
ethical. To be a true Christian is simply to take 


FUNDAMENTALISM 17 


Christ as ethical Master in unselfish promotion of 
human welfare and happiness in this world. 

The English and American Liberals rarely ex- 
hibit the thoroughgoing consistency of the Germans. 
But, as various addresses at the Girton Conference 
of 1921 * and numerous other productions show, 
the lines of their argument are clearly pointed to- 
wards, and reach their logical completion in, Har- 
nack’s standpoint. 

The radical nature of that standpoint, and its 
hopeless disagreement with historical Christianity, 
seem very clear. And the idea of God itself is re- 
duced to an abstraction—mere goodness, in the form 
of idealistic efficiency for a comfortable world. 
The worship of Christ becomes pagan Jesuolatry. 


3. Fundamentalism 


Fundamentalism represents a recoil from Liber- 
alism on the part of Protestants who seek to retain 
the orthodoxy of Protestant confessionalism. Dr. 
Straton of New York is a militant pulpit supporter, 
and Mr. William J. Bryan an eminent lay defender. 

It insists upon the inerrancy of biblical writers, 
and rejects important scientific conclusions as con- 
trary to the Word of God. In particular, it is at 
war with the scientific doctrine of evolution, and de- 


4 Published in The Modern Churchman, Sept. 1921. 


18 THE BATTLE OF STANDPOINTS 


fends the historic reality of all the miracles recorded 
in both Testaments. 

The strength of the Protestant reaction against 
Liberalism has surprised many; but it does not indi- 
cate that rigid Fundamentalism, as above described, 
is accepted by all who train with the Fundamentalists 
in the present conflict. Many of them have been in- 
fluenced to a degree in their views by modern knowl- 
edge. But they agree with Dr. Machen of Prince- 
ton that “Liberalism” has gone far beyond the 
acceptance of scientific results, and has reached a 
standpoint which is hopelessly opposed to Christian- 
ity in all its genuine forms.° Real Fundamentalists 
are the extremists among the Protestants who are 
fighting Liberalism; and, in rejecting established 
modern knowledge upon the basis of a highly pre- 
carious inference from biblical inspiration, they 
weaken rather than help the cause of Protestant 
orthodoxy. They seem to be fighting for a lost 
cause. | 


4. Ecclesiastical Modernism 


Modernism ® was born in the Roman Communion, 
and grew out of various efforts to reconcile papal 
allegiance with the modern mind and with scientific 


5 See his Christianity and Liberalism. 
6 On which, O. C. Quick, op. cit., Lec. ii. 


MODERNISM 19 


and critical knowledge and thought. It was given 
challenging expression by A. Loisy’s The Gospel 
and the Church (1902), and was met by papal 
condemnation in 1907, followed by disciplinary 
measures which soon drove it into hiding. 

The arguments of Loisy and of the English 
George Tyrrell,” and their tragic experiences, drew 
the sympathetic attention of various Anglican schol- 
ars. Their own Anglican ministry raised a prob- 
lem similar to that of Roman Catholic Modernists, 
the problem of reconciling allegiance to the Catholic 
creeds and other Catholic elements retained in the 
Anglican Church with an innovating standpoint. 
They developed a Modernism which is analogous to 
that of the Roman Modernists, although somewhat 
softened and adjusted to Anglican conditions. 
From England it has invaded the American Episco- 
pal Church, losing in this migration some, not all, of 
its coherence and clear distinctness from Liberalism. 

Modernism substitutes fruitful ideas for given 
Gospel facts as the basis of Christianity, and the 
progressive development of these ideas for the au- 
thoritative origin of a sacred and unalterable deposit 
of faith and order. As with Liberalism, natural 
human experience and scientific scholarship are em- 
phasized, but with a significant difference. Liberal- 


7 Lex Orandi, 1903; A Much-Abused Letter, 1907; Medi- 
e@valism, 1908, etc. 


20 THE BATTLE OF STANDPOINTS 


ism grounds all in similar individual experiences 
leading to organized Christianity; whereas Modern- 
ism puts the Church first as the condition and sphere 
of normal Christian experience, which it treats as 
primarily social and organic. The late Josiah 
Royce’s conception of “the beloved community”’ 
is analogous to this, except in not identifying the 
“community” with the historic Catholic Church.® 

Behind Modernism is the evolutionary philosophy, 
and the theory that the Incarnation is neither one 
event nor confined to Jesus Christ, but is a long 
process by which God actualizes and finds Himself 
in developing mankind. And Christianity is to be 
described as something that is ever becoming, never 
a static thing. What, it once was it has outgrown, 
and it is becoming what as yet it is not. Catholic 
creeds and dogmas are significant memorials of past 
stages of Christian evolution. As such, like the 
Scriptures, they are rightly retained; but they are 
not to be accepted as valid for present belief, except 
as subjected to evolutionary and symbolical inter- 
pretation. It is asserted that even the most conserv- 
ative believers no longer accept the articles of 
the creed in their original sense, and that since evolu- 
tionary change of meaning is an established law of 
the Church’s interpretation of them, symbolical in- 
terpretation is entirely consistent with ministerial 


8 The Problem of Christianity, 2 vols. 


CONSERVATISM 21 


pledges of conformity to the Church’s doctrine. 
This and other details of the Modernist argument 
will be reckoned with later. 


5. Conservatism 


Conservatism among us falls back on the Anglican 
reformation appeal to antiquity and on the Church’s 
official Book of Common Prayer. It regards 
Christianity as forever determined by the self- 
manifestation, redemptive work, teaching and pre- 
scriptions, doctrinal, ethical and institutional, of 
Jesus Christ, very God Incarnate, completed and 
embodied by His Holy Spirit in His apostolic 
Church. Christianity is rooted in adoring loyalty 
to the divine Person of Jesus Christ; and its nec- 
essary and abiding elements consist of what was re- 
ceived once for all from Him and His Holy Spirit 
in the first century. 

Having thus received these things, the Church 
holds itself bound permanently to preserve and ad- 
minister them for the eternal welfare of mankind. 
The resulting Catholic creeds are believed to affirm 
correctly such elements of the original Christian 
faith as experience has shown to be in need of such 
formal affirmation and prescription. If we distin- 
guish between what the creeds themselves really 
affirm and the mental context of ancient believers 


22 THE BATTLE OF STANDPOINTS 


which many have read into them, we find that their 
articles retain their original meaning, and in that 
meaning still have authority in the Church, in par- 
ticular over the Church’s official teachers. Such is 
the position, implicit at least even when not precisely 
defined, which seems to determine the standpoint of 
the silent majority of Episcopalians; and it has been 
mightily fortified by the so-called Catholic move- 
ment—at present quite the most powerful movement 
in the Anglican Communion. 


6. Opposed Presuppositions 


The notion that men can study vital subjects en- 
tirely without bias, that is without being influenced 
by previous assumptions, is not so generally accepted 
as it used to be. Borrowing a thought recently ex- 
pressed by President Butler, a mind that is open “at 
both ends” can retain nothing. A mental back- 
ground, some previous state of conviction, however 
rudimentary, which will control the interpretation 
of experience is essential for intelligent study. A 
really empty and opinionless mind is incompetent for 
scholarly work. Real scholarship starts with as- 
sumptions, although its value depends upon its clear 
recognition of its assumptions, upon fearless facing 
of all experience, and upon readiness to modify or 
even to abandon such assumptions as are found to 


OPPOSED PRESUPPOSITIONS 72% 


be inconsistent with fuller knowledge. “The mod- 
ern mind” is controlled by one group of assump- 
tions; while the conservative mind, whether Prot- 
estant or Catholic, is controlled by another. So long 
as this is the case, mutual agreement in the matters 
now in controversy is impossible. Scholarship is 
found on both sides; but, apart from other require- 
ments yet to be considered, common results can 
be reached only through reconsideration of initial 
assumptions. The battle, intellectually considered, 
is one of standpoints. 

The standpoint of historical Christianity is rooted 
in acceptance of the supernatural, of a specific and 
miraculous manifestation of God in history, and of 
the eternal, inherent and full possession by our Lord 
of the unique and indivisible Godhead. The stand- 
point of “the modern mind’ is determined by 
the assumption that genuine miracles are intrin- 
sically incredible, especially such miracles as the 
Virgin Birth and the bodily Resurrection of Christ; 
and by an exclusively human conception of Christ’s 
earthly life that necessarily involves destructive 
treatment of the Gospel evidences of His personal 
claims. Out of this opposition of initial assump- 
tions grows the whole welter of current controversy. 
“The modern mind” claims to have scientific scholar- 
ship wholly on its side. It accuses the conserva- 
tive of having a “closed mind” and of being at 


24 THE BATTLE OF STANDPOINTS 


war with science. Intelligent conservatives reject 
both this claim and this accusation. They repudiate 
the scientific validity of the Modernist’s naturalism, 
and find that “the modern mind”’ is itself “closed” 
to any just consideration of the Christian doctrines 
which it assails. 


CHAPTER Ii 
THE CASE OF EVERYMAN 


“EVERYMAN”’ is a symbolical name for one who is 
no more and no less intelligent than the vast major- 
ity of his neighbours, and who is subject to the nor- 
mal difficulties and temptations that beset our race. 
He has his own individual conditions, aptitudes and 
limitations ; but on the whole he is just human. His 
case calls for careful consideration by those who 
would help him. 

He is created for God, and so made that enjoy- 
ment of the relations with God and His other chil- 
dren wherein eternal life consists can alone really 
satisfy him. But he is sinful, and sinfulness is fatal 
to the satisfaction of this need. His supreme need, 
therefore, is to obtain deliverance from sin—in- 
cluding not only divine forgiveness, but entire eman- 
cipation from sin’s enslaving power. He has other 
problems, and is apt to regard such of them as affect 
his temporal welfare and happiness as most im- 
portant. 

This mistaken judgment is due to the spiritual 
blindness which sin has inflicted upon mankind; and 

25 


26 THE CASE OF EVERYMAN 


many ages of experience confirm the conclusion 
that, if carnal utilitarianism is to give way to a 
justly proportionate estimate of problems and to an 
enlightened and effective pursuit of eternal life, 
this must be the result of superhuman teaching and 
help, believingly and penitently received. More- 
over, when Everyman thus learns what his supreme 
problem is, and what is “the way’’ to its solution, all 
his other problems become endurable, even if their 
solution is wanting, for they are seen to disappear 
with the attainment of eternal life. 

Christ has brought immortality to light by reveal- 
ing eternal life and “the way” thereto. And the 
faith which has been given to the Church to prop- 
agate affords the light by which alone Everyman 
can discern “this way.” The Catholic creeds em- 
body it in terms that he can sufficiently appropriate, 
even though he neither can solve, nor needs to solve, 
the academic problems which they suggest to in- 
tellectuals. If Everyman is to appropriate this 
faith, it must above all things be presented positively, 
clearly and with confident assurance. This is so 
because he is by nature peculiarly susceptible to such 
methods of propaganda; and in things that man can- 
not discover for himself, but needs to know, he de- 
pends upon competent, authoritative and unambigu- 
ous teaching. 

The Church was established and commissioned 


THE CASE OF EVERYMAN 27 


to give just such teaching; and long experience 
shows that one does not need to accept any theory 
of ecclesiastical infallibility in order to discover that 
by practicing the obedience of faith in submission to 
the laws of life prescribed in the Church he can at- 
tain sufficient spiritual knowledge and guidance to 
enter into life eternal. This is what really matters. 
The sadness of the present situation lies in the 
sophistication of modern intellectuals. They have 
enveloped the clear elements of Christian teaching 
in a maze of insoluble problems, which they treat 
as reasons for doubting the credibility of Christian 
certainties. The causes of this phenomenon I have 
indicated above, and I hope to show that neither 
Liberalism nor Modernism are taking the right road 
to the truth—the truth, I mean, that pertains to 
eternal life. The point which I am now making is 
that these movements and standpoints perplex 
Everyman instead of guiding him into life. 
Liberals and Modernists instinctively imitate the 
dogmatic method of the Church which they assail, 
and their voices are very loud, therefore impressive 
to the untrained Everyman. The newspapers, as 
I have shown, give prior space to new propaganda, 
because it constitutes “news,’’ which conservative 
utterance does not. Current fiction also reflects the 
substitution of problems for Christian certainties. 
I am not impugning the mental integrity and honesty 


28 THE CASE OF EVERYMAN 


of Modernists when I add that attacks on the 
Church’s faith by those who are pledged to teach 
it in its integrity manifestly add to the perplexities 
of Everyman instead of bringing him to the feet of 
Jesus Christ and to the way of eternal life. 

Everyman is said to be profoundly discontented 
with the Churches. This assertion does not usually 
come from him, for he is ordinarily not given to 
self-expression, and indifference rather than dis- 
content is most frequent. It comes from those 
who are engaged in telling him that he ought to be 
discontented, no doubt with the effect of making him 
think that his independence of ecclesiastical affilia- 
tion has religious value. 

I sympathize greatly with the churchless, not less 
so because I cannot agree with current ascriptions 
to them of profound religious earnestness and truly 
spiritual concern with religious problems. In gen- 
eral, they reveal in saddening forms the univer- 
sal limitations of men when unenlightened by true 
_ Christianity and unconverted to its saving faith and 
discipline. The rise of churchless Christianity, so- 
called, is simply a revelation of the fact, often over- 
looked, that truly converted Christians have for 
ages constituted only a minority of Church mem- 
bers, the Church-allegiance of the rest being due to 
influences other than genuine conversion to Christian 
truth and practice. It is the weakening of these 


THE CASE OF EVERYMAN 29 


extraneous influences that is setting the unconverted 
free from their unreal ecclesiastical allegiance. A 
sad situation emerges, but not fundamentally new. 
An old situation is being unveiled—simply that. 
It is also becoming clear that the untrained masses 
have been unconsciously affected by the same his- 
toric causes which, as indicated in my first chapter, 
explain the rise among intellectuals of the “modern 
mind.” And the propaganda of Liberals and Mod- 
ernists is calculated to persuade the churchless that 
in abandoning their traditional Christian allegiance 
they have, unbeknown to themselves, put themselves 
in the way of becoming more religious. Alas, they 
have simply shown themselves to be unconverted. 
How shall Everyman be converted? Not by 
solving the passing social and economic problems 
of our time, although surely competent Churchmen 
should labour for such solution of them as is pos- 
sible. Not by promoting his immediate welfare 
and earthly happiness, although converted Chris- 
tians cannot consistently fail to go about “doing 
good.” The road of Everyman to conversion lies 
through his being personally convinced of sin, 
through his being brought to the knowledge of 
Christian certainties, and through his being per- 
suaded that believing and penitent adoption of the 
ancient Christian ‘“‘Way” opens up the only road 
out of sin into the life worth living. Plenty of 


30 THE CASE OF EVERYMAN 


clear and assured doctrinal teaching is needed, and 
a propaganda in which the problem of sin is faced 
and practically solved by conversion, repentance and 
saving grace. Our clergy need to realize that the 
problems of scholars are outlying adjuncts which 
can wait, so far as helping Everyman is concerned ; 
and that he can be saved, whether they are solved 
or not, only through the penitent obedience of faith 
and love. Scholarship cannot unearth any new way 
to eternal life. If loyal, it can help the simple to 
find the old way. If disloyal, it simply breeds con- 
fusion. 


CHAPTER IV 
RECENT EVENTS 
1. The Attack 


THE present controversy within the Episcopal 
Church was not due to the recent pastoral of the 
House of Bishops, nor did it originate in any ag- 
gression of conservatives. If certain official agents 
of the Church’s propaganda had refrained from pub- 
licly ventilating doubts concerning doctrines which 
their office explicitly pledged them to teach, this 
trouble would not have arisen. The bishops were 
not, as has been asserted, the aggressors. Their 
pastoral was defensive. | 

The attack began some time ago. In the late 
Dr. Heber Newton’s Church and Creed (1891), 
for example, the Nicene Creed was brought under 
fire as imposing Greek metaphysic—a contention to 
be dealt with later—and the practice of progressive 
interpretation was advocated, as affording relief 
from literal acceptance of certain articles of the 
creed. The alarm which the consequent agitation 

31 


n2 RECENT EVENTS 


produced was met by a pastoral issued in 1894 by 
a committee of bishops appointed to compose and 
publish it. And, when the unrepresentative nature 
of this pastoral was objected to, the House of 
Bishops in the General Convention of 1895 formally 
ratified it. . 

Again, in 1906, Dr. A. S. Crapsey of Rochester, 
New York, having attacked the Nicene Creed on 
the same lines, and, refusing to yield to his bishop’s 
private admonitions, was tried before his peers in 
Batavia and convicted of heresy touching the God- 
head of Christ, His Virgin Birth and His bodily 
Resurrection. He appealed, and his conviction 
was unanimously confirmed by the Court of Review 
in New York City. The late Dr. William R. Hunt- 
ington was a member of this court. Dr. Crapsey 
then renounced his ministry and was deposed on that 
ground. 

During the past couple of years the attacks on 
the creeds have been resumed, and a non-literal in- 
terpretation of the Virgin-Birth and certain other 
articles has been defended. Finally, the Bishop of 
Massachusetts has ventured to assure such candi- 
dates for the ministry as feel unable sincerely to 
teach the Virgin Birth as literal fact that they need 
not think themselves on this account to be unable 
honestly to make the prescribed ministerial pledges 
and enter the Church’s ministry. He has also laid 


RESULTING REACTION 33 


some stress on the relative unimportance of the doc- 
trine of the Virgin Birth.’ 

In the meantime the then Rector of the Church of 
the Ascension, New York City, made a pulpit utter- 
ance which seemed to many to imply his personal re- 
jection of the doctrine of the creeds concerning 
Christ’s Person. His bishop then called on him 
either to remove this impression by definitely ortho- 
dox language or to withdraw from the ministry, the 
conditions of which he could not honestly fulfil. 
Instead of pursuing this proper course, the rector 
sent to the bishop an elaborate plea for liberty to 
disregard such doctrinal restrictions. Inasmuch as 
he had refused clearly to define his views on the ques- 
tions at issue, and had used no clearly indictable 
language, his trial for heresy would have been a 
vain undertaking, and the bishop suspended further 
procedure with an explanation to this effect. The 
rector’s prestige has not been enhanced by his clever- 
ness. 


2. The Resulting Reaction 


It was widely felt that some official means should 
be taken for defence of the Church against what 
~looked like a deliberate movement to nullify the 
force of its ministerial requirements and its doc- 


1 William Lawrence, Fifty Years, pp. 46 ff. 


24 RECENT EVENTS 


trinal prescriptions. As the House of Bishops was 
soon to meet in special session, a responsible group 
of prominent laymen published an appeal to that body 
for advice and guidance. Such were the provok- 
ing causes and the immediate occasion of A Pastoral 
Letter, issued by the House of Bishops sitting in 
Dallas, Texas, November 14-15, 1923—defined in 
that letter as “widespread distress and disturbance 
of mind among many earnest church people, both 
clerical and lay, caused by several recent utterances 
concerning the Creeds,” also the fact that, ‘‘as the 
Chief Pastors of the Church solemnly pledged to up- 
hold its Faith, we have been formally appealed to 
by eminent laymen for advice and guidance with re- 
gard to the questions thus raised.” 


3. The Pastoral 


The bishops begin by saying, We “put forth these 
words of explanation and, we trust, of re-assurance.” 

1. The superior importance of “the profession of 
our belief in, 1. e. of entire surrender to, the Triune 
God”’ is asserted; “‘but the affirmation of the facts, 
declared by Scripture and a part of the belief of 
the Christian Church from the beginning, is of vital 
importance to faith and life.” 

2. “The Creeds give and require no explanations 
of the facts which they rehearse,” nor of the Trinity, 


THE PASTORAL 38 


the Incarnation, the manner of union of our Lord’s 
natures, and “the nature of the resurrection body.” 

3. “The shorter Apostles’ Creed is to be inter- 
preted in the light of the fuller Nicene Creed,” etc. 

4. The imposition of such a “test of sincere 
purpose of discipleship” as the Apostles’ Creed, 
along with the other baptismal vows, “is reasonably 
required for admission to the Christian society.” 

5. The relevant requirements by which ministerial 
adherence to the Church’s faith is guarded are de- 
scribed. “It is irreconcilable” with the ordination 
vows “for a minister of this Church to deny, or to 
suggest doubt as to the facts and truths declared in 
the Apostles’ Creed.” 

6. “To deny, or to treat as immaterial belief in 
the Creed” regularly recited in the Church’s Serv- 
ice, “is to trifle with words and cannot but expose 
us to the suspicion and danger of dishonesty and 
unreality,” etc. “To explain away the statement, 
‘Conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin 
Mary,’ as if it referred to a birth in the ordinary 
way, of two human parents, under perhaps excep- 
tionally holy conditions, is plainly an abuse of lan- 
guage,” etc. 

7. “Objections to the doctrine of the Virgin 
Birth, or to the bodily Resurrection of our Lord 
Jesus Christ . . . have been abundantly dealt with 
by the best scholarship of the day.” 


36 RECENT EVENTS 


8. “It is not the fact of the Virgin Birth that 
makes us believe in our Lord as God; but our be- 
lief in Him as God makes reasonable and natural 
our acceptance of the fact ... as declared in the 
Scriptures and confessed in the Creed from the ear- 
liest times.” 

g. “The Creed witnesses to the . . . purpose of 
the Church not to explain but to proclaim the fact 
that the Jesus of history is none other than God 
and Saviour,” etc. 

10. The Creeds do not impose “fetters’’ on free 
thought but give “a point of departure’ for it. 
“The Truth is never a barrier to thought,” but 
“makes us free.”’ 


4. Modernist Rejoinders 


The Modernists have been stirred by this pastoral 
to a series of warm pulpit protests; and various 
branches of the Modernist argument have been 
again set forth in several books and pamphlets.? 
They mistakenly allege that the bishops have ac- 
cused them of personal dishonesty, and to have 
threatened discipline; they deny the statement that 
the best scholarship of the day has met the ob- 
jections to the doctrines of the Virgin Birth and 


2 Reference will be made in due course to the more im- 
portant ones. 


CONSERVATIVE ACTION 37 


the bodily Resurrection; and they criticize the 
bishops for issuing such a pastoral under such con- 
ditions, some of them treating it as an uncanonical 
attempt to legislate and to impose new doctrinal re- 
quirements. 

Along with other lines of attack, they reiterate 
their arguments for liberty to interpret the creeds 
symbolically ; and while usually avoiding direct and 
explicit denials, they renew their defence of the right 
to deny the literal facts of the Virgin Birth and bod- 
ily Resurrection of our Lord. In this connection, 
several new attempts have been made to show that 
neither the evidence for the fact of the Virgin 
Birth nor its importance, if proved, is sufficient to 
justify its being imposed as an article of the Chris- 
tian faith. Some of them are advocating changes 
in the Prayer Book, designed to release baptismal 
candidates from acceptance of the Apostles’ Creed, 
and to make the creeds optional in the public serv- 
ices. The New York Churchman has converted 
itself largely into an organ of Modernism; and, 
as might be expected, the newspapers have chiefly 
reflected in their columns the Modernist side of the 
debate. 


5. Conservative Action 


Conservative utterances have been less numer- 
ous, and have gained less publicity. The Living 


38 RECENT EVENTS 


Church defends the conservative cause, as does also 
the American Church Monthly. There has been no 
panic, thanks no doubt to the reassuring effect of 
the pastoral, but a perceptible increase of positive 
teaching from the pulpit. 

It signifies much in estimating the situation to 
notice that the Modernist movement, claiming the 
support of 500 clergy—a very doubtful claim indeed 
if conscious and specific approval of Modernist ne- 
gations is meant—is offset by a notable strengthen- 
ing in recent years of the Catholic movement, nec- 
essarily at one with the general body of conservative 
Churchmen in this controversy. This movement is 
quite the most powerful one at the present moment 
in the Anglican Communion, especially in England. 
And here in America it gave a demonstration at 
the Priests’ Convention in Philadelphia, April 
29-30, quite exceeding in extent of immediate sup- 
port anything that the Modernists can exhibit. In 
spite of the obstacle that, through inadvertence, the 
date of the Convention coincided with that of the 
Church Congress at Boston, and although the Con- 
vention extended its invitations only in the Eastern 
sections of the nation, over 700 priests took part. 


CHAP TE Tavs 
THE ISSUES RAISED 


Tue first issue which I intend to discuss in the 
following chapters stands by itself, and is of the 
moment only. I refer to the Bishops’ Pastoral, its 
ecclesiastical justification under the circumstances, 
and the fitness and correct pertinence of its content. 
The other issues fall under three heads. 


1. Preliminary Issues 


(a) There is the claim that natural science has 
so enlarged and corrected the ancient conceptions of 
the universe which controlled the early development 
of Christian doctrine that certain resulting articles 
of the -Catholic creeds, including their miraculous 
elements, have ceased to be credible among educated 
men.* 

(b) Related to this is the further claim that sci- 
entific biblical criticism has discredited not only the 

1Cf. Dr. D. S. Miller’s word, “that no thoroughly educated 
man believes in the literal Virgin-Birth.” New Republic, 


Mch. 5, 1924. 
39 


40 ISSUES RAISED 


historical and scientific infallibility of biblical docu- 
ments in general, but also the textual and historical 
value of those portions of the Gospels from which 
the evidence for the doctrines now in controversy 
is gathered. 

(c) There should be added the claim of Mod- 
ernists that real scholarship supports their position, 
and that the traditional position and arguments re- 
veal hopeless bias and a “closed mind.” 


2. Issues as to the Creed 


(a) It is contended that apart from some simple 
expression of personal loyalty to Christ, no doctrinal 
profession like that of acceptance of the articles of 
the Apostles’ Creed ought to be required for admis- 
sion to Church membership. The principle that 
Christians, as such, are under obligation to accept 
any particular definitions of doctrine is rejected. 

(b) Entire personal freedom of investigation, 
conviction and expression of conviction is claimed 
for Christian scholars, a claim which is not usually 
disputed by conservatives. But Modernists inter- 
pret this freedom as including the right of those who 
have reached convictions contrary to doctrines in 
the creed to accept, retain and exercise the Church’s 
official ministry for publicly assailing such doctrines. 
The issue is not one of personal freedom of thought, 


DOCTRINAL ISSUES Al 


but of responsibility incurred in voluntarily accept- 
ing and retaining office in the Church’s propaganda. 

(c) There is also the issue of interpretation. 
Do the creeds bind in their originally imposed sense? 
Is what is called “progressive interpretation,” es- 
pecially when it reverses the original meaning of the 
creeds, permissible to those who profess to accept 
them loyally? 


3. Specific Doctrinal Issues 


The most prominent ones are three: 

(a) The doctrine that the Jesus Christ of history 
has ever been and ever will be in Person the eter- 
nal Son of God,—fully possessed of the indivis- 
ible Godhead of God the Father. Connected with 
this is the assertion that the Nicene Creed affirms 
an antiquated Greek metaphysic; and also certain 
novel definitions of the Incarnation. 

(b) The doctrine that our Lord was conceived 
and born of a virgin, without human paternity, by 
the special operation of the Holy Spirit, this doc- 
trine being rejected in favour of a symbolical in- 
terpretation inconsistent with the fact therein as- 
serted. 

(c) The doctrine that our Lord rose from the 
dead and subsequently withdrew into Heaven in the 
body wherein He was crucified, this body under- 


42 ISSUES RAISED 


going mysterious change, but remaining a real body. 
This resurrection, so far as defined to be truly a 
bodily one, is rejected. 


In thus defining the issues, I do not mean to 
imply that all those who are willing to be called Mod- 
ernists individually assume in each of them the more 
radical Modernist positions. None the less, the 
movement as a whole has certainly raised them, and 
substantially in the forms which I have described. 
I believe that the majority of our Episcopal Mod- 
ernists have failed to realize the revolutionary na- 
ture of the cause to which they are lending support, 
and the very radical significance which their lan- 
guage consequently seems to have to many Church- 
men. I think this to be the case, in particular, with 
the loyal-hearted Dr. Leighton Parks. And no one 
is a “heretic,” properly speaking, who does not ex- 
plicitly and provably repudiate some formal doctrine 

of the Church. | 


CHAPT EH Ravel 
CRITICISMS OF THE PASTORAL 


I am here concerned only with such criticisms as 
have to do with the pastoral itself, its legitimacy, 
regularity and fitness under the circumstances of its 
being issued. Criticisms which pertain to issues 
that are independent of the merits or demerits of the 
pastoral I discuss elsewhere, in their proper connec- 
tions. 


1. [ts Canomcal Regularity 


(a) We may safely assume that the objections 
made by some to the general right of the bishops 
to issue pastorals were made either in ignorance or 
under unreflecting impulse. But it may be well to 
point out that our bishops have the status of “chief 
pastors’ and at their consecration are required to 
pledge themselves “with all faithful diligence, to 
banish and drive away from the Church all errone- 
ous and strange doctrine contrary to God’s Word; 
and both privately and openly to call upon and en- 

43 


44 CRITICISMS OF THE PASTORAL 


courage others to do the same” (italics mine). A 
pastoral letter is plainly a suitable method of doing 
this “openly,” is in accord with apostolic example, 
and, whether issued by individual bishops within 
their several jurisdictions or collectively by the 
House of Bishops to the Church at large, is in full 
accord with canonically recognized precedents in this 
Church. 

(b) The objection that pastorals from the House 
of Bishops are legitimate only during sessions of 
the General Convention has no force except on the 
double assumption that to issue a pastoral is a leg- 
islative act, and that no collective action of the 
bishops, whether legislative or other, is permissible 
between sessions of the General Convention. Both 
assumptions are mistaken. A pastoral is not legisla- 
tive, and neither can, nor pretends to, change the 
Canon Law of the Church in any particular. It is 
simply a method by which bishops normally exercise 
their appointed duty of calling the attention of 
_ Churchmen to doctrines and obligations already con- 
tained in the Church’s legislation. No canons limit 
the occasions for fulfilling this duty; and inasmuch 
as the House of Bishops meets from time to time 
between General Conventions for the transaction of 
business, this particular business is legitimately at- 
tended to at such sessions. And it is not the first 
time that a pastoral has been issued by the bishops 


CANONICAL REGULARITY 45 


in special session. Such action is therefore normal. 

(c) It is objected, however, that no notice of 
this business was given when the Dallas meeting 
of the House of Bishops was called, so that it was 
out of order. Apart from the probability that the 
issuance of a pastoral by the House of Bishops is 
always in order when it is gathered in duly con- 
stituted session, unless explicitly excluded by the 
terms of the summons, it is not the rule of the House 
of Bishops to feel debarred from taking up any 
business that may normally be presented for its 
consideration. 

(d) The fact that a minority only of bishops 
entitled to attend was present does not nullify its 
action in this matter unless it nullifies the rest of 
their proceedings, which no one alleges. A canon- 
ical quorum was present after due notice to all, 
and no canonist will venture seriously to maintain 
that a quorum ceases to be such because many have 
absented themselves. The objection that the House 
was packed with reference to the pastoral has not 
been made, and is of course incredible. The fact 
that an important memorial was to be presented, 
one that would be likely to be answered, if at all, 
by a pastoral, was known beforehand, and this ef- 
fectually bars out such an objection. To all this 
should be added the entire normality of the pastoral 


1Cf, the Pastoral of 1894. 


46 CRITICISMS OF THE PASTORAL 


under the circumstances that called it forth. There 
was no straining of authority on the part of the 
bishops. ‘The vote was formally unanimous, and 
the assertion said to have been made by one bishop 
(not named), that he would have voted “no” ex- 
cept for lack of courage, is not worth considering. 
If any widespread disapproval of the pastoral ex- 
isted among the absent bishops, such disapproval 
would surely have gained expression before this. 


2. Its Language 


(a) The bishops have been charged with making 
“threats” of discipline towards the Modernists. 
This is certainly a mistake. It is true that the 
bishops said, “Among the offences for which he” 
(a minister) “is liable to be presented for trial is 
the holding and teaching publicly or privately, and 
advisedly, doctrine contrary to that of this Church.” 
But the context makes it perfectly clear that they say 
this simply by way of showing how seriously the 
Church regards the obligation of its ministers to 
conform to its doctrine. Their language was di- 
dactic. Not one word of threat appears. 

(b) The Modernists complain that they were ac- 
cused of personal dishonesty in the pastoral. Again 
they are quite mistaken. Personal dishonesty means 
conscious or intentional dishonesty. With entirely 


ITS LANGUAGE 47 


honest intention men sometimes adopt modes of 
action which none the less are inconsistent with gen- 
erally recognized external requirements of honesty ; 
and it was with these requirements that the pastoral 
was concerned. It undertook to remind men of 
them in relation to the use of creed language. The 
aspect of mental integrity which Modernists empha- 
size—of unqualified devotion to truth, wherever 
it may lead—is of course fundamental, and as a 
branch of such devotion Modernists, no doubt, have 
truly persuaded themselves that they can honestly 
affirm articles of the creed while interpreting them in 
a sense that really reverses their generally acknowl- 
edged meaning. The pastoral does not deny the 
honesty of their intention in doing this. It simply 
points out what they have failed to realize, that is, 
that no one can thus empty doctrinal professions of 
their generally recognized meaning without violat- 
ing previously accepted standards of honesty, and 
thereby incurring both “the suspicion and the danger 
of dishonesty.” Most men will agree with the pas- 
toral on this point, and will perceive that the re- 
minder was needed. 


3. Two of its Assertions 


(a) Denial has been given to the bishops’ asser- 
tion that “Objections to the doctrine of the Virgin 


48 CRITICISMS OF THE PASTORAL 


Birth, or to the bodily Resurrection of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, . . . have been abundantly dealt with 
by the best scholarships of the day”; and the sug- 
gestion has been made that our bishops’ are not 
themselves really competent to estimate scholarly 
work. Pending fuller discussion in another chapter 
of what is required for scholarly competence in re- 
lation to the subjects mentioned, for the present I 
limit myself to two remarks. | 

In the first place, our bishops are certainly com- 
petent to perceive the patent fact that a very con- 
siderable array of writers, widely reputed to be 
competent scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, 
have published works in which they reckon, with 
seeming thoroughness and scholarly temper, with 
all the data pertaining to the two facts in question, 
and conclude in favour of their acceptance as facts. 
Se:ondly, the initial standpoint of consistent Liberal 
and Modernist scholars, controlled by the assump- 
tion that such miracles violate natural causation and 
are intrinsically incredible, forbids that their investi- 
gations, however thorough, should lead to other than 
negative conclusions as to the historical reality of 
these events. The battle is one of standpoints, with 
able scholars on both sides. It is, of course, an 
objectionable form of dependence upon authority to 
rest the case finally on appeal to scholars, without 
ourselves examining their data and arguments; and 


TWO OF ITS ASSERTIONS 49 


in due course I shall try to reckon fairly with them 
in this book. 

(b) The bishops truly say, “It is not the fact of 
the Virgin Birth that makes us believe in our Lord 
as God; but our belief in Him as God makes rea- 
sonable and natural our acceptance of the fact... 
as declared in the Scriptures,” etc. This acknowl- 
edgment has been taken to show the comparative 
unimportance of the Virgin Birth, if a fact. Sim- 
ilar language by Bishop Gore had already been 
similarly misapplied by the Bishop of Massachusetts. 
The fallacy appears in the premise that the sole 
importance of the Virgin Birth lies in its being the 
basis of belief in our Lord’s very Godhead, that is, 
wholly in its evidential aspect. In another chapter 
I shall present several reasons for acknowledging its 
importance. 


CHAPTER VII 
NATURAL SCIENCE AND THE CREEDS 
I. Scientific Results Helpful to Faith 


ALONG with a great number of firm believers in 
the facts of our Lord’s Virgin Birth and bodily 
Resurrection, I am convinced of the immense value 
of the results of modern natural science. For many 
years I have tried to keep abreast of its inspiring 
work, and have been prepared without reserve to 
accept any of its results which appear really to be 
established. In particular, as my volume on Evolu- 
tion and the Fall shows, I consider the evolutionary 
theory of the origin of organic species to be firmly 
established in its main lines. And my theological 
outlook permits the hypothesis that physical descent 
at least from brute ancestry is to be ascribed to the 
human species. Man is of course what he is, no- 
tably superior to all other species, and possessed 
of unique rational, moral and spiritual attributes 
and relations, whatever may have been the method 
of his creation by God, whatever may have been his 
ancestry. 

50 


SCIENCE HELPFUL TO FAITH 51 


Although natural science has acknowledged limita- 
tions—I shall return to this—and is thereby pre- 
cluded from determining either the possibility of 
the miracles affirmed in the Catholic creeds or the 
truth of the supernaturally revealed doctrines therein 
asserted, it does none the less afford important serv- 
ice in the relative interpretation of Christian articles 
of faith. By relative interpretation I mean the 
task of affording a context of sound natural knowl- 
edge in which to perceive more and more truly and 
richly the manifold bearings and applications of re- 
vealed truths. These truths, without being changed 
in themselves, are more intelligently linked up with 
other truths and facts; and theology, the progres- 
sive human science of divine things, is thereby im- 
mensely enriched, and incidentally purged of crude 
ideas belonging to outgrown stages of natural 
knowledge. The supernatural facts and mysteries 
of the Christian faith are relieved of erroneous in- 
ferences formerly confused with them. A suspi- 
cious attitude towards natural science, rightly de- 
veloped, is. contrary to the interests of a sound and 
reasonable Catholic theology. Iam absolutely sure 
of this. 

It is quite consistent with this, however, that 
theologians rightly exhibit caution in modifying the 
changeable elements of their science because of al- 
leged new results of natural science. In the first 


52 NATURAL SCIENCE AND THE CREEDS 


place, theological specializing usually precludes ex- 
pertness in natural science, and makes it necessary 
for theologians to wait until the new results have 
firmly established themselves in the general consent 
of the intelligent. Many an alleged “result” has 
before long proved to be either erroneous or in need 
of modification. The nervous up-to-dateness of 
some theologians towards natural science is am- 
ateurish rather than indicative of mature judgment. 
Accordingly, the fact that theology is apt to be 
deliberately slow in appropriating the results of nat- 
ural science is not a just reason for adverse criti- 
cism. It is really an inevitable incident of sanity in 
theological progress. 


2. The Limits of Natural Science 


In the last century the amazing advances of sci- 
entists in unveiling nature’s secrets drew the atten- 
tion of many, even among scientists themselves, 
away from the necessary limits of natural science— 
limits which our Modernist admirers of its methods 
and successes seem to overlook. These limits are 
now being more and more clearly acknowledged and 
even emphasized by scientists of the very first rank.? 

(a) The first of these limits is the purely de- 

1See Sir J. Arthur Thomson, in Hastings, Encyc. of Relig. 


and Ethics, s.v. “Science,” §§ 8, 11; Karl Pearson, The Gram- 
mar of Science, passim. 


LIMITS OF NATURAL SCIENCE 53 


scriptive and non-explanatory nature of scientific re- 
sults. In a loose sense, of course, science is said to 
explain an event when making known its immediate 
physical antecedent. Thus we say that a rise of 
the thermometer is explained by increased heat. 
But strictly speaking no explanation is here given— 
only a description of the observed order or sequence 
of phenomena. Why a certain order prevails in 
natural phenomena is not explained. The fact that 
it does rule, so far as scientific observation extends, 
this and this only, is asserted. And the assertion is 
called a law of nature. 

(b) In the second place, natural laws do not de- 
fine what must happen, but only what is regularly 
observed to happen under specified conditions. It 
is reasonably assumed in what may be called the 
scientist’s faith, although impossible to demonstrate, 
that these laws will always hold good so long as the 
conditions of their application continue, that is so 
long as the general system of nature endures. And 
the scientist reasonably trusts in the rationality of 
the universe. He therefore proceeds confidently in 
trust that nature will never put him to confusion, 
and that the generalized results of his investigations 
will never be fundamentally upset. 

Christian theologians agree with him in this, for 
they believe that God is the ultimate Governor of the 
universe, and that capricious operations are incon- 


54 NATURAL SCIENCE AND THE CREEDS 


sistent with His perfection. What is called the 
uniformity of nature is theologically interpreted as 
showing that God always operates in the best way, 
which means in a similar manner under similar con- 
ditions. The limitation for natural science is that 
in the plan and purpose of God, which is vaster than 
the order that is open to scientific scrutiny, new con- 
ditions and factors may arise, and new steps be 
taken, which, without at all stultifying the natural 
order, will cause events to happen that can neither 
be anticipated by science nor brought within the 
scope of its generalizations. These events we call 
miracles, and their possibility can neither be proved 
nor disproved by science. They come to be known 
when severally observed to happen, one by one. In 
brief, science is concerned only with events that can 
be generalized and, on that basis, can be predicted 
as part of the present continuing visible order. Be- 
yond this field science can assert or deny nothing. 

(c) Finally, natural science is exclusively con- 
— cerned with natural events and their observable con- 
ditions. Articles of the Christian faith, which have 
reference to invisible realities, to Christ’s pre- 
existent Person, to the triune nature and purpose 
of God, and to the divinely predicted end of things, 
do not come within its field. Whether they are 
credible or incredible must be determined by rea- 
sons lying outside its range. Scientists may indeed 


NATURALISM IS NOT SCIENCE 55 


have rational grounds for accepting or rejecting 
such doctrines, but they are not rightly described as 
scientific. The scientific does not include all that 
can be accepted rationally, but only that which can be 
observed and generalized for the description of the 
present visible order. 


3. Naturalism is not Science 


Naturalism is not science, although many people, 
including apparently some of our Modernists, con- 
fuse its assertions with scientific results. It is a 
speculative philosophy only; and, while professedly 
undogmatic, is really excessively dogmatic in claim- 
ing to make scientific assertions concerning matters 
lying outside of the field of science. Its distinctive 
dogma is that all knowable reality is subject to the 
methods of generalized description employed by nat- 
ural science; and consequently nothing is either 
knowable or credible that cannot thus be described. 
It ought to be seen that such an assertion is un- 
scientific, for it is concerned with what confessedly 
lies beyond the range of scientific scrutiny and de- 
scription.” 

Science can make assertions only with reference 
to subject matters within its field of enquiry. The 


-20On Naturalism, see R. Otto, Naturalism and Religion; N. 
S. Talbot, Returning Tide of Faith, chh. xii-xiii. 


56 NATURAL SCIENCE AND THE CREEDS 


credibility of assertions concerning events and re- 
alities outside this field natural science cannot deter- 
mine. It has to be judged on other grounds. To 
say this is entirely consistent with acknowledgment 
that no assertion from any quarter is credible which 
reduces science to confusion by nullifying its funda- 
mental trust in the rational continuity of nature. 

We must not make the blunder of regarding the 
distinctive mental habits and limitations of scientific 
specialists as serving of themselves to prove or dis- 
prove anything. It is a natural result of constantly 
and intently thinking and reasoning in the manner 
required in successful scientific work that one gets 
into a mental groove, and is apt to approach all 
questions whatsoever in the same manner. The 
consequence is that expert natural scientists some- 
times become unable to adjust their minds to the 
consideration of truths lying outside the scientific 
sphere and requiring other methods of approach and 
judgment. Charles Darwin lamented the fact that 
- his absorption in scientific work had deprived him 
of his early power of discerning and enjoying 
beauty. 

The same effect may, and does, appear in the in- 
ability of certain natural scientists to reckon dis- 
cerningly with the truths and arguments of religion, 
and in their consequent loss of faith. It should 
be clear, however, that such a difficulty arises from 


THE ATTACK ON MIRACLES 57 


personal and subjective limitations. It affords no 
evidence whatever that science and the faith mutually 
disagree. The fact is that many scientists of the 
foremost rank have been and are devout believers 
in the doctrines of the Catholic creeds. 


4. The Attack on Miracles 


The traditional faith of Christians includes be- 
lief that certain events have actually happened which 
are generally acknowledged to be miraculous—im- 
possible without supernatural causation. Those 
who occupy the standpoint of naturalism confidently 
deny the possibility of such events, and claim to 
make this denial on strictly scientific grounds. As 
I have just shown, this claim to speak in the name 
of science is mistaken, for miracles do not belong 
to the order of events with which natural science, 
as science, can concern itself. Unless, therefore, 
miracles can be shown to nullify the rational con- 
tinuity of the present natural order, upon which the 
possibility of natural science depends, the prelim- 
inary question whether they can happen is not sci- 
entific. 

Naturalistic objectors habitually support their de- 
nial of miracles by views concerning the universe 
which widely prevailed in the eighteenth and nine- 
teenth centuries, but which are now out of date. 


58 NATURAL SCIENCE AND THE CREEDS 


The purely mechanical conception of things and 
events, alleged to preclude any divine intervention, 
has ceased to be accepted by the scientific experts 
of to-day. In brief, the current arguments against 
miracles, alleged to be scientific, are antiquated. 
Unhappily Liberal and Modernist writers are not as 
a rule expert scientists, but reflect in their arguments 
the mechanical conception of nature which science 
has outgrown. The more radical among them 
frankly accept the naturalistic point of view, and 
are thereby precluded from facing the evidence for 
miracles. Our Episcopal Modernists do not as a 
rule consciously go so far; but by their method of 
argument they do show that the naturalistic idea 
of the universe controls their imaginations. They 
do not seem to have found out how unscientific 
it 1s, 

This idea lurks in the inaccurate although some- 
what common, definition of miracles as events which 
violate natural law. Such a definition gives plaus- 
ibility to the mistaken inference that they “nullify 
the rational continuity of the present natural order, 
upon which the possibility of science depends.” If 
they really did this they would of course be in- 
credible on scientific grounds. But they do not. 

The same out-of-date idea of the universe lurks 
in the argument that to believe in miracles leads us 
to look for God’s revelation of Himself wholly in 


THE ATTACK ON MIRACLES 59 


the abnormal and capricious, as if nature were out- 
side of God and purely mechanical. The fact is that 
theism, or the doctrine that mature is God’s handi- 
work and everywhere reveals His uninterrupted ac- 
tivity and purposeful wisdom has always been ear- 
nestly maintained by intelligent believers in the 
miracles of the Gospels and Catholic creeds. In- 
deed it is because men discern the power and wisdom 
of God in nature that they recognize His hand in 
miracles; and what they learn of God’s attributes 
in the natural order becomes a test by which to dis- 
tinguish genuine miracles from spurious ones. 

The difference in this connection between natural 
and supernatural events is not that the latter are 
more divine, or more significantly so, than the for- 
mer, and that revelation comes exclusively from the 
supernatural. The difference lies in the kind of 
revelation that is afforded in each case, and in the 
respective immediate purposes of God which the 
natural and the miraculous severally fulfil. Natural 
events pertain to the development and maintenance 
of the order of things in which God has placed us 
at this stage of the larger divine drama. Miracles, 
on the other hand, are shiftings of scenery, sup- 
plementary operations, new factors, that pertain to 
transitional stages in God’s larger plan and serve 
to keep this present stage of things in line with the 
future world for which it is preparatory. 


60 NATURAL SCIENCE AND THE CREEDS 


Again, the natural reveals divine purpose in all 
things, but affords no definition of that purpose; 
whereas the miraculous indicates more articulately 
what God’s purpose is, and accredits prophetic def- 
inition of it. Without the natural there could be 
no general religious outlook for man; but the super- 
natural gradually gave to God’s Church the specif- 
ically Christian outlook, with its authentic knowl- 
edge of God’s kingdom and of the appointed way 
into eternal life with Him which is man’s final end. 
Unless this the Christian outlook is wholly at fault, 
genuine miracles are rational factors in God’s ful- 
filment of the vaster plan to which the natural 
also ministers. They therefore have a credible place 
in the whole, and so far from in any way “‘violating”’ 
the natural order, they really promote in their own 
way the same purpose to the fulfilment of which 
“the whole creation moves.” JI shall illustrate this 
conclusion when I come to consider the Virgin Birth 
-and the Resurrection. 


5. The Real Meaning and Place of Miracles 


The fact that the ancients regarded many events 
as miraculous which the progress of science has 
shown to be natural events not yet understood, has 
led many to define the supernatural as simply the 
unknown natural. But, although certain reputable 


THE REAL PLACE OF MIRACLES 61 


Christian writers have adopted such a definition, 
it is misleading, and has the result, often unintended, 
of obscuring and even of nullifying the doctrine 
of our Lord’s Person and work. An objective dis- 
tinction between what is natural and what is super- 
natural to man is essential to belief in the Christian 
faith. 

Miracles may be defined as visible supernatural 
events; but to understand this we must understand 
what is meant by the term “supernatural.” The 
supernatural is not the unnatural, as many seem to 
think; nor is it contrary to nature. Its meaning 
depends upon the particular application we are mak- 
ing of the terms “nature” and “natural’’ when we 
employ that word. 

There are many natures in the total field of 
reality—all the way from inorganic things up to 
the triune God; and when considered together they 
make up a rising series, in which the higher may be 
described as super, above, the lower. Human na- 
ture, for example, is a super-nature as compared with 
brute nature. What distinguishes these natures, 
and justifies regarding one nature as higher or lower 
than another, is the special group of properties, 
powers and functions that, in God’s distribution of 
His operations, are made to be native to each kind 
of being—or the resident properties, forces and 
functions in each kind. ; 


62 NATURAL SCIENCE AND THE CREEDS 


Corresponding to these several natures is a rising 
series of applications of the word “natural’’; and in 
each application we mean whatever in a given kind 
or grade of being can_be explained by its own native 
or resident properties, powers or forces and func- 
tions. It is natural to a man, for example, to be 
and do whatever the properties, forces and functions 
resident in human beings, as such, enable him to be 
and do. 

Having in mind these objective differences be- 
tween the natures of various grades of being, and 
between what is natural to one and to another, we 
can see that what is natural to one kind of being to 
do may be above what is natural to another kind. 
And that is what we mean when we say that, al- 
though it is natural to a man to think abstractly and 
form religious opinions, it is supernatural to an 
apple-tree to do so. In Christian use the term 
“supernatural” applies to that which, although per- 
fectly natural to.a super-human agent, in particular 
to God, is above what is natural to man and to all 
beings of lower natures than his. It has to be ex- 
plained by a higher nature than his, and by higher 
forces than are resident in the group of natures of 
which human nature is the crown. A miracle is 
such an event if it is a visible one and innovates 
upon natural phenomena. ‘The operations of God 


THE REAL PLACE OF MIRACLES 63 


in our souls, called “grace,” are also supernatural, 
but because invisible are not called miracles. 

It can readily be seen that while the supernatural 
and miraculous in theological use of language stand 
by themselves and have unique meaning, they are 
not properly speaking unnatural, for they are natural 
to God, whether He performs them immediately or 
enables His human agents to do so. Moreover, on 
a lower level, we find abundant analogies in our own 
exercise of power to supplement, manipulate and 
even counteract the properties, forces and functions 
of the natural realm beneath the human. The whole 
progress of human invention is filled with illustra- 
tions. We counteract the law of gravity by our in- 
vention and use of aeroplanes, and in a thousand 
ways bring about events which if described from the 
point of view of the natures utilized’ are miraculous 
to them. 

The complex and mutually counteracting inter- 
play of the particular natures that make up “nature” 
in the ordinary use of that word involve no in- 
credible unreason—not even when we include the 
factor of human wills. Why, therefore, should the 
coming in of a higher and wiser will than that of 
man, and of other events higher than those which 
science can generalize, be thought to involve caprice, 
unreason and the “violation” of nature? 


64 NATURAL SCIENCE AND THE CREEDS 


6. Tests of Credibility 


I have referred to the fact that events have been 
regarded as miraculous which subsequent progress 
in knowledge has shown to be natural in the usual 
sense of that term. It must also be acknowledged 
that many alleged events, even biblical ones, which 
would be truly miraculous if they really happened, 
did not happen at all. And this fact is given by 
some moderns as throwing doubt on the Gospel 
miracles. What it really shows is that an alleged 
miracle must be able to meet certain tests of genuine- 
ness and quality before it can be rationally accepted 
as real and divine. 

(a) There must be evidence, and it must be com- 
petent, trustworthy and sufficient. The mere fact 
that a biblical writer describes a miracle is not always 
sufficient. 

(b) A real miracle is necessarily related to the 
general course of the history of God’s world; and 
its credibility depends upon this relatedness being 
perceptible to the competent. A purely capricious 
wonder, especially if the innovation involved is 
either grotesque or violent, is not credible. 

(c) On the principle that God does nothing super- 
fluous, no alleged miracle can be reasonably thought 
to be from God for which a sufficient reason or oc- 
casion is lacking. This principle explains why 


TESTS OF CREDIBILITY 65 


miracles are usually connected with some decisive 
step in God’s plan, of which the Incarnation and 
associated events afford the most important ex- 
ample. 

(d) Inasmuch as a divine miracle signifies in a 
special way an act and revelation of God Himself, 
it will necessarily be found to have a spiritual quality 
and meaning agreeable to its source. 

These tests require for their just application real 
openmindedness towards the possibility of the mir- 
acles under investigation, and spiritual capacity to 
estimate their congruity with God’s plan and method 
of working. The negative bias that genuine Mod- 
ernists exhibit in this matter does not encourage de- 
pendence upon their competence rightly to determine 
the credibility of the Virgin Birth and bodily Resur- 
rection of our Lord. 

To conclude the argument of this chapter, I wish 
to emphasize a very central thought. The stand- 
point of sane belief in miracles is the Christian view 
of the world as God’s world, and the belief that 
God is no mere anima mundi, but is a personal 
being, who is not only actively working through- 
out the natural order, but transcends it, and governs 
it in relation to a vaster purpose of His own.? 

8 On the subversive effect in Modernist thought of failure 


to realize the transcendence and personality of God, see Chas. 
Gore, The Holy Spirit and the Church, pp. 321-324, 331-334. 


CHAPTER VIII 
BIBLICAL CRITICISM 
1. The Nature and Origin of the Bible 


THE Bible is built up out of many documents of 
different kinds, produced at various stages in the 
education by God of His Church, Jewish and Chris- 
tian, and having a considerable variety of immediate 
occasions and purposes. It is really a library; and 
because of the various degrees of personal inspira- 
tion that attended the production of its documents, 
as well as the divine guidance and sanction that have 
given to the whole its use and authority for that use 
in the Church, it has been called “the Divine Li- 
brary.” In the Greek it was called the Biblia 
(plural), the “Books”; but in being transliterated 
through the Latin into English the name has as- 
sumed the singular number, the “Bible.” Both 
forms agree with fact. The plural indicates its 
varied productions, while the singular “Bible” in- 
dicates its spiritual unity as a whole. 

One divine mind and purpose overruled not only 
the human production of its books, but also their 

66 


NATURE AND ORIGIN OF THE BIBLE 67 


gradual selection and combining in one Scripture 
for making its readers ‘‘wise unto salvation through 
faith which is in Christ Jesus.’”’* The inspiration 
is therefore twofold: (a) that of its several writers, 
editors and redactors, which varies widely in de- 
gree; (>) that of the resulting Scripture, under 
guidance of the Holy Spirit authenticated, united 
in one Canon, and ordered to be read for upbuilding 
in faith. It is in the latter application that the 
word “inspired” is used in the New Testament— 
“Every Scripture inspired of God.” ? The inspira- 
tion of the sacred writers is also there asserted, but 
in other terms. 

The ancient Church never defined officially the na- 
ture and method of inspiration, although there is 
abundant evidence of three elements in its doctrine: 
(a) that the Old Testament prophets and the apos- 
tolic writers were personally and sufficiently inspired 
of God; (6) that the resulting Bible has divine in- 
spiration and authority for its religious purpose. It 
constitutes appointed reading for believers; (c) 
that the Bible in various ways contains all doctrines 
and principles necessary to be believed and applied 
by Christians for salvation and spiritual health. 
The ancient Church did not treat Scripture as 
“source” of the faith, for that was recognized to 


171 Tim. iii, 15. 
2TI Tim. iii, 16. 


68 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 


come directly from Christ and His Holy Spirit to 
the Church. But it did hold that appeal to the 
Scriptures is the divinely appointed rule for testing 
the Church’s faithful adherence to its God-given 
message. Accordingly, nothing was held as nec- 
essary to be believed which could not be confirmed 
by Scripture. It was generally maintained that the 
Church is the interpreter of Scripture to this extent 
that its universally accepted faith will always be 
found to afford the doctrinal clue to the meaning 
of Scripture at large. 


2. The Growth of Bibliolatry 


The Jews came to regard the Scriptures in a very 
mechanical way, and anticipated some later Chris- 
tian developments. But, while apostolic and post- 
apostolic Christian writers exhibited great reverence 
for them as “‘the Word of God,” they were strikingly 
free in their quotations and use of biblical passages 
_ for the support of Christian teaching and practice. 
In joyous assurance that the divine purpose behind 
all the Scriptures is centred in Christ, they discerned 
with a non-critical abandon many Christian lessons 
and predictions in the Old Testament which to the 
more detached modern scholars do not appear to be 
confirmed by critical exegesis. The ancients did 
not aim to be critical, and often their free interpreta- 


THE GROWTH OF BIBLIOLATRY 69 


tion of Scripture seems more in accord with its 
underlying divine purport and appointed use than 
the subservience of moderns to detached words and 
phrases, with their assumption that the immedi- 
ate and exact thought of the original writer makes 
up the whole meaning of his language in its biblical 
context.2 We much need a wholesome combina- 
tion of modern exactitude with the ancient stand- 
point. Such a combination would complete and 
rightly apply the valuable results of modern biblical 
criticism. 

The primitive doctrine of Scripture was crystal- 
lized in the habit of calling the Bible “the Word of 
God,” a phrase which might have a meaning analo- 
gous to that of “the house of God,” that is, referring 
to its being built for, and consecrated to, a use of 
divine appointment. One might take it in such 
meaning without contradicting any official definition 
of the ancient Catholic Church. But the tendency 
to use the phrase in a more literalistic and mechan- 
ical sense was a natural outcome of the increasing 
tendency to magnify sacred things with heedless dis- 
regard for limiting considerations. So to call the 
Bible the Word of God came popularly to mean a 
Scripture dictated throughout by God. 

Out of this theory grew further notions: (a) that 
all the sacred writers were equally inspired, and to 


8 Cf. I St. Pet., i, 10-12. 


70 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 


the degree of being invariably inerrant in their state- 
ments on every subject; (b) that all parts of Scrip- 
ture have demonstrative value for their respective 
subject-matters, and_ that detached proof-texts are 
conclusive, severally considered; (c) that no alleged 
results of extra-scriptural, historical and scientific 
investigation may be accepted as true, if they go 
counter to any statements of the sacred writers. 
There also grew up the superstitious practice among 
the ignorant of appealing to passages of Scripture, 
selected hap-hazard, for solution of all sorts of prac- 
tical problems. And several deplorable religious 
ideas and practices, based upon giving equal and 
abiding force to every part of Scripture, have been 
exploited with considerable following, even in mod- 
ern days. Mormon polygamy affords an example 
of this. 

These developments had in the main gained wide 
popular acceptance previously to the Protestant rev- 
olution. But in giving confessional standing to the 
doctrine that the Bible is “the sole source and rule 
of the faith,’ Protestants in effect stigmatized as 
unorthodox any denial of the equal inspiration of 
the sacred writers or of the inerrancy of their state- 
ments on all subjects. At the same time their strong 
emphasis on “private judgment” in the interpreta- 
tion of Scripture led logically, and in due course, to 
the application of such judgment to the task of 


RESULTS OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM 71 


biblical criticism. We can see, therefore, that in 
diverse ways Protestant Fundamentalism and biblical 
criticism, with its mixture of valuable results and 
destructive theories, have both grown logically out 
of the Protestant revolution. 

I desire, before going on, to emphasize the fact 
that the post-apostolic developments above described, 
whether among Catholics or Protestants, are not 
parts of the original Christian faith. And their 
being discredited in our day, so far from undermin- 
ing the apostolic and Catholic doctrine concerning 
Scripture, relieves that doctrine of embarrassing 
burdens. The divine authority of the Bible for its 
appointed use is as secure as ever. 


3. Biblical Criticism and its Results 


We should not think that we can safely describe in 
advance the qualities that will be found in the Word 
of God. The Bible has been given to us for devout 
study; and only by such study, by rightly ordered 
criticism, can we learn what kind of a Bible it is, in 
particular, to what degree, and with what resulting 
incidental accuracy, its several writers were person- 
ally inspired. 

Again, we should not think that biblical criticism 
means adverse criticism. It means searching ex- 
amination of Scripture for the sake of accurate 


72 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 


biblical knowledge. Such criticism may, of course, 
be untrustworthy in its conclusions, because of either 
the critic’s lack of scholarly skill, insufficient data, 
unspiritual and hostile animus, or misleading initial 
assumptions. No critic is infallible. But it is no 
longer possible intelligently to deny that certain 
results of modern biblical criticism are dependable, 
and clarify rather than undermine the belief that the 
Scriptures are the Word of God.4 

(a) Textual criticism has forced us to realize 
more fully than previously the uncertainty of the 
accepted readings of very many passages in Scrip- 
ture, and the impossibility of producing an edi- 
tion of the Bible which does not differ from the 
original in numerous details. These variations hap- 
pily do not affect or obscure the real substance of 
biblical teaching at large on any article of the Chris- 
tian faith; but they very plainly upset the verbal 
dictation theory of inspiration as applied to our 
existing Bible. 

(6) Literary criticism has upset previous ideas as 
to authorships and dates of biblical documents. 
Several Old Testament books have been shown to be 
of composite authorship. The Mosaic authorship 
of the Pentateuch is no longer accepted by the gen- 


4JT have more fully discussed this whole subject in Author- 
aty, Eccles, and Biblical, ch. vi-vii (with refs.) ; and in The 
Bible and Modern Criticism (Morehouse). 


RESULTS OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM 73 


erality of competent biblical scholars. In general, 
if the place of individual documents in the Word of 
God depends upon their human authorships, upon 
the accuracy of their descriptive titles, and upon their 
freedom from subsequent editing, redacting, and 
combination with other documents, then that place 
in a number of instances is discredited and the 
Sacred Canon requires radical reconstruction. No 
such reconstruction is needed, for what the Bible 
should contain has been once for all determined by 
our Lord’s sanction of the then completed Old 
‘Testament and by the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the 
Church in gradually forming the New Testament 
Canon. What literary criticism really helps us to 
see is that the content and divine authority of the 
Bible for its appointed Christian use is distinct, and 
to a degree independent of, fhe sources and original 
forms of its several documents. It is the Bible that 
Christians have received, rather than so many an- 
cient documents severally preserved; and they have 
received it as given for a specific Christian use. 

(c) Historical and scientific criticism has shown 
conclusively that biblical writers were not every- 
where inerrant in their narratives, but that they re- 
flect the limitations of knowledge of their times. 
This is too widely acknowledged to require argument 
here. Moreover, doctrinal and moral criticism has 
brought to light the presence in Old Testament books 


74 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 


of both doctrinal and moral ideas and ideals which 
are inconsistent with New ‘Testament teaching. 
The Old Testament language concerning Sheol, the 
place of the departed, and its approval of vindictive 
forms of justice and retaliation afford examples. 

These results have not dethroned the Bible from 
its authoritative position in Christian use; but they 
have removed unwarranted and indefensible enlarge- 
ments of the doctrine of biblical inspiration. They 
relieve us from the need of thinking that the Bible 
contains a series of oracles of equal value and in- 
fallibility. The progressiveness of God’s education 
of His people sufficiently explains the unequal values 
for us of the memorials of that education therein 
preserved. And recollection in our use of the Bible 
of the specific and limited purpose for which it has 
been divinely given to us causes the whole of it to 
serve in making men “‘wise unto salvation through 
faith which is in Christ Jesus.” It also frees us 
from useless fears as to possible results of historical 
and scientific investigation. 


4. Critical Blunders 


Biblical criticism, as I have indicated above, is 
not always competent; and is sometimes vitiated by 
unspiritual and hostile animus and by blinding initial 
assumptions. We should not maintain, however, 


CRITICAL BLUNDERS 75 


that we can consistently accept the undeniable re- 
sults of Old Testament criticism and at the same 
time condemn the application of criticism to the New 
Testament. It is not New Testament criticism as 
such which is to be rejected, but the assumptions 
that have controlled such criticism in its destructive 
forms, and which explain its negative conclusions. 

The general honesty, sobriety and credibility of 
New Testament narratives have been amply vindi- 
cated in our day by competent critics. It has been 
urged a priori, however, that acknowledged errors 
of magnitude in one part of the Bible suggest the 
likelihood of their being found in the other part. 
But an important difference between the Two Testa- 
ments has to be reckoned with. The Old Testament 
narratives in question were written centuries after 
many of the events alleged in them, whereas those of 
the New Testament embody, either directly or in- 
directly, the memories of living and firsthand wit- 
nesses. Moreover, what knowledge we have from 
other sources tends to show that these narratives cor- 
rectly reflect the historical conditions of the age to 
which they refer. 

The critics who have reached negative conclusions 
touching important elements of the Gospel narratives 
are obviously controlled by two assumptions: (a) 
that miracles such as the Virgin Birth, the bodily 
Resurrection, and others given in the Gospels, violate 


76 BIBLICAL CRITICISM 


natural law and cannot happen; (b) that Christ was 
not a preexistent divine Person, but merely a human 
person, although highly endowed and of exalted 
moral character. 

I have yet to discuss the Virgin Birth and the 
Resurrection. I content myself at present, there- 
fore, with pointing out the impossibility that those 
who make such assumptions should do justice to the 
evidence for these events. They simply beg the 
question at the outset. I have sufficiently indicated 
in my previous chapter the lack of warrant for the 
assumption that the Gospel miracles referred to 
could not happen. 


CHAPTER IX 
FAITH AND SCHOLARSHIP 
1. Faith and the Faith 


I trust that, in discussing the two chief lines of 
scholarship that are said by Liberals and Modernists 
to require abandonment, or at least re-interpretation, 
of certain creed doctrines, I have not seemed to 
disparage either the value of scholarship in relation 
to Christian doctrine or the importance for intelli- 
gent faith of its recent results. It would be contrary 
to my long-established convictions to do so; contrary 
also, I am certain, to the convictions of many thou- 
sands of those in the Episcopal Church who, like my- 
self, firmly believe all the articles of the Christian 
faith as contained in the Apostles’ Creed, interpreted 
in its original sense. But if we are clearly to under- 
stand wherein the proper function and value of such 
scholarship consist, we ought first to reckon with 
the two subjects of faith and the faith. 

For our purpose it is sufficient to define faith 
as the personal appropriation, in belief and practi- 
cal application, of truths spiritually discerned, and 

77 


78 FAITH AND SCHOLARSHIP 


which are supernaturally revealed rather than dis- 
covered by unassisted human enquiry. By the faith 
is meant the body of truths thus revealed, and 
taught to be necessary for our guidance in pursuing 
the way of eternal life. The spiritual discernment 
by which we apprehend these truths is made pos- 
sible by the gracious enlightenment of God’s Holy 
Spirit, and is not dependent either in exercise or in 
assurance upon scholarship. The receptive spirit 
of a child is primary and indispensable. The nature 
of faith is such that the mysteries of God are usually 
hid from the worldly wise and prudent and revealed 
to babes.! 

This law of faith makes the appropriation of 
divine truth—such appropriation as opens the way 
to God and eternal life—possible for all, for the 
ignorant as well as the learned, for the foolish as 
well as the wise, for the unscholarly as well as the 
scholarly. It is what we have received with spirit- 
ual docility, rather than what we have toilsomely in- 
vestigated and thought through, which according to 
New Testament teaching enlightens us savingly. 
The faith is available in every age for all, and under 
the same conditions of humble receptivity for all. 
It is catholic—that is, within Everyman’s reach. 
And faith is found to serve its purpose, even in the 
unintelligent and unscholarly; although, if exercised 


2 St. Wake: xi 2ts Ori Gora 


CHRISTIAN SCHOLARSHIP 79 


with due sense of responsibility, it will become in- 
telligent in proportion to the believer’s general mental 
equipment and education. 

But the limited range of the faith which can thus 
be appropriated by Everyman should be realized. 
It consists exclusively of saving truths, the truths 
we must receive in order rightly to travel Godward. 
It does not include the wider range of progressive 
and changing knowledge and opinion to which, as 
context, believers in each age inevitably endeavour 
to relate the faith. Nor does it include the infer- 
ences which believers make from articles of the 
faith when thus linked up with their general knowl- 
edge and opinions. It consists of truths once for 
all revealed, abidingly true, and in essential sub- 
stance unalterable. 


2. The Part of Christian Scholarship 


Christian scholarship has to do in general with 
making Christian faith more intelligent, and thus 
more persuasive and defensible in the intellectual 
world.2 It did not discover the faith, and it can 
neither enlarge nor alter the substance of what is 
necessary to be believed by faithful Christians. It 
cannot of itself produce faith. But among‘ the 
intelligent it is useful for removing difficulties, and 


Sloot het citi 15, 


80 FAITH AND SCHOLARSHIP 


often becomes an incidental instrument of the Spirit 
in His work of spiritually enlightening our minds. 
In order thus to serve, however, scholarship has need 
to be controlled by the humble spirit of faith rather 
than by the challenging spirit of mere intellectualism. 

The leading functions of Christian scholarship 
may be classified as follows: (a) to confirm the faith 
by accurately conducted biblical study, study gov- 
erned by the historical method, but also by truly 
Christian presuppositions and outlook; (b) to elim- 
inate from current definitions of articles of the 
faith whatever has been humanly added to them, the 
test of Scripture being employed to that end; (c) 
to link up the faith in a reasonable way with wider 
human knowledge and opinion, and to correct this 
linking up whenever the attainment of more mature 
knowledge requires it; (d) to translate the ancient 
language of faith, whether biblical or ecclesiastical, 
into the terms and forms of thought of subsequent 
generations, care being taken that the translation is — 
not only intelligible but faithful to the original; (e) 
to reconstruct theological science and apologetic, 
without alteration of the original faith, whenever 
this will make the content of the faith more reason- 
ably understood by intelligent men, both in itself 
and in its manifold bearings and applications. Cath- 
olic theology is not the faith, but is a human science 
built around it. Being human, this theology also 


PRESENT STATE OF SCHOLARSHIP 81 


makes progress by the aid of progressive scholar- 
ship, often correcting its human elements, but always 
presupposing the unchanging truth of the faith. 


3. The Present State of Scholarship 


Modernists are accusing conservative maintainers 
of ecclesiastical doctrine of lack of scholarship, and 
no doubt much defense of such doctrine is unschol- 
arly. Every standpoint of considerable acceptance 
has crude defenders. ‘None the less, there is an im- 
mense amount of real and competent scholarship ar- 
rayed in support of the traditional faith. 

Several causes have combined to hide this fact 
from Modernists. In the first place, they do not 
usually study conservative theology seriously, as is 
shown by the grotesque misconstructions which they 
often put upon it. They rightly plead for open- 
mindedness, but do not exhibit it in the conservative 
direction. Secondly, they take for granted that to 
believe in the literal fact of the miracles which they 
reject is necessarily unscholarly, quite overlooking 
the fact that their own prejudice against such mir- 
acles is based, not upon scholarship but upon nat- 
uralistic assumptions and question-begging dogma- 
tism. Finally, publicity attends innovating rather 
than conservative scholarship. Much scholarly 
work on the conservative side is known only to 


82 FAITH AND SCHOLARSHIP 


conservatives, whereas we all learn of the work of 
Liberal and Modernist scholars, and it is difficult 
for an intelligent conservative to close his mind to 
their arguments. 

And it is this last-mentioned cause that conceals 
the general state of scholarship from ordinary men, 
the men whose chief reading is in the newspapers, 
popular periodicals and current fiction. Even many 
of the clergy are misled. While I was in England 
last year an intelligent priest said to me, “I would 
have greater respect for the Anglo-Catholic move- 
ment if it were more scholarly.” I sat down at 
once and compiled a list of such Anglo-Catholic 
scholars as I could immediately remember. Giving 
it to him, I asked, ‘‘Can there be furnished an 
equally large and weighty list of scholars in any 
other section of English Churchmen?’”’ After some 
pondering he said, “No.” The Anglo-Catholic 
movement, whatever else it may be, is essentially 
conservative for all articles of the Catholic creeds; 
and its scholarship, either unknown or disparaged by 
Modernists, is a significant factor in the present 
situation. 

It is axiomatic, of course, that freedom of enquiry 
and conviction is essential to successful scholarship. 
Concerning this freedom, and the consistency there- 
with of the position taken in this volume, I shall 
have something to say in the next two chapters. 


CHARTER X 
FAITH AND FREEDOM 
1. Mutually Interacting Principles 


Tuis chapter may seem abstract to some of my 
readers. If so, they can skip it without losing the 
main thread of my argument. 

In relation to doctrine there are two Christian 
principles of fundamental importance, neither one 
of which can be sacrificed without damage to the 
other and spiritual disaster to souls. When sep- 
arately defined and contrasted they may seem to 
be mutually opposed; but they are really mutu- 
ally dependent and mutually protective. I refer to 
responsibility for rightly seeking, accepting, and 
obeying revealed truth, on the one hand, and per- 
sonal freedom in truth seeking, conviction, and 
expression thereof in word and act on the other 
hand. 

As I have said, neither of these can safely be 
sacrificed. It follows that neither of them can 
safely be emphasized disproportionately or exclu- 
sively. The reason is that disproportionate atten- 

83 


84 FAITH AND FREEDOM 


tion to one of them leaves no place in the mind for 
sufficient attention to the other. It is necessary, 
therefore, that we attend to each by turns, and thus 
do justice to both. Moreover, as we shall see, 
neither of these principles assumes its true form, 
or can be brought to perfect practical observance, 
when considered and applied without reference to 
the other. Within the Church the ever-recurring 
problem is to protect both in mutual relation, and 
thus most effectively to protect each fruitfully. 


2. Responsibility 


It is generally acknowledged that in order to be 
responsible we must have real freedom in the sphere 
of our responsibility. But this freedom is respon- 
sible freedom. Freedom without this limit is un- 
principled license; and universal experience shows 
that this finally results in personal defeat and slavery. 
It is not real freedom. The principle of respon- 
sibility, then, cannot be neglected if freedom is to 
be preserved. 

The specific kind of responsibility which we here 
have to face is that for obedience to revealed truth. 
And this involves due observance of those methods 
and conditions of finding, accepting, and expressing 
such truth as general experience shows to be re- 
quired for its spiritual discernment, its protection 


RESPONSIBILITY 85 


from subversion and its unadulterated and unreduced 
propagation among the mentally untrained masses 
of believers. We are by nature social beings; and 
in no department of human action is pure individu- 
alism, regardless of the interests of others, consist- 
ent with either adequately responsible action or gen- 
uine freedom. We have to remember three things: 
(a) It is the truth that makes us free; (b) The 
freedom which truth promotes is social, dependent 
for full enjoyment upon a successful propaganda of 
truth among the ignorant as well as the scholarly ; 
(c) The truth referred to is religious truth, that 
which God has revealed and which had to be thus 
revealed if men were to obtain it. 

A principle function and duty of the Church is to 
safeguard this principle of responsibility in relation 
to revealed and saving truth. Human causes and 
limitations have made its execution of this function 
imperfect; and, in particular, have led to methods 
of discipline which have endangered the principle of 
freedom, also incumbent upon the Church to safe- 
guard. The modern revolt against ecclesiastical re- 
straints is therefore natural. But it is also one- 
sided, and in the long run will encourage chaotic 
license rather than true free thought. If the 
Church’s propaganda and discipline are really im- 
perilled in the effort to restore the balance between 
responsibility and freedom, there is nothing to take 


86 FAITH AND FREEDOM 


their place, and unregulated license will result. This 
will be as fatal to true mental freedom as to re- 
sponsibility, and the possibility among the masses 
of obtaining helpful guidance to saving truth will 
be very seriously reduced. | 

My argument here is not based upon any partic- 
ular theory of ecclesiastical authority, certainly not 
upon the theory of ecclesiastical infallibility. It 
rests in the social aspects and practical requirements 
of sound knowledge of saving truth by Christians in 
general. It is not individualistic intellectual gym- 
nastic in truth-seeking that will make men free, but 
the acceptance of truth by Christians in common; 
and this is not possible without a corporate prop- 
aganda and discipline of some kind, such as the 
Church alone can provide. This may need reforma- 
tion, but its flouting spells disaster for the mass of 
the faithful. 


3. Freedom 


Freedom, as has been acknowledged, is a neces- 
sary condition of responsibility. Only free agents 
are responsible, and their responsibility is confined 
to the sphere of their freedom. ‘This principle is 
very precious, and is rightly insisted upon by Mod- 
ernists. The onesided manner of this insistence is 
what is open to adverse criticism, and it is so in 


FREEDOM 87 


spite.of their sincerity and of the reality of the ob- 
scurantism which they reject—with exaggerated 
ideas as to its extent among conservatives, I must 
add. 

I must not exaggerate. I do not accuse Modern- 
ists of actually denying the principle of respon- 
sibility, Their mistake lies in losing sight of certain 
integral elements of responsible action through dis- 
proportionate emphasis upon the principle of mental 
freedom. That is, they onesidedly sacrifice to free- 
dom genuine requirements of responsibility. And 
the outcome of their full success is bound to be de- 
structive to freedom as well as to responsibility. 
Mental freedom in the sphere of our discussion is 
not unregulated and individualistic intellectualism, 
but humble-minded pursuit and acceptance of re- 
vealed truth, with subsequent guidance of thought 
by its requirements. 

In this connection, it is quite misleading to think 
that the acceptance of a dogmatic faith is necessarily 
a hindrance to free thought. If that faith agrees 
with truth, it affords sound premises and a secure 
basis for free mental activity. Only if it is either 
false, unintelligible or misleading, does dogma ham- 
per mental freedom. In no other field than that of 
religion do sane men think that an increase of as- 
sured premises reduces the freedom and value of 
scholarship and thought. The only defensible aim 


88 FAITH AND FREEDOM 


of scholarship is to minister to truth, to its attain- 
ment and intelligent coordination and application. 
It therefore welcomes previously established truth 
—in sound theology that includes truth known to 
have been divinely revealed—as affording secure 
basis of further progress. And clear definitions of 
such premises will be gladly utilized by genuine 
scholars unless found to be defective. The thought 
which real thinkers wish to be free is intelligent 
thought—not aimless mental agitation. The ob- 
jection to ecclesiastical dogma as being inconsistent 
with mental freedom has no validity unless such 
dogma is defective; and it is a very significant 
fact that historically this objection to the creeds 
has its origin in loss of belief in their truth. Those 
who are satisfied as to their truth feel no restriction 
of mental freedom in accepting them. 


CHAPTER XI 
ECCLESIASTICAL RESPONSIBILITY 
I. Bases of Argument 


In approaching the questions connected with ec- 
clesiastical control of doctrine, the imposition and 
interpretation of creeds, and the resulting obliga- 
tions of Church members and ministers, I wish to 
make clear the limits within which my argument on 
these questions is conducted. First, however, can- 
dour requires me to acknowledge that personally I 
unreservedly accept the claim of the Catholic Church 
to be the divinely appointed and supernaturally 
guided teacher of saving truth. I belong to the 
Episcopal Church because I believe it to be a real 
part of the Catholic Church. While IJ think the 
term “infallibility” is as misleading when applied 
to the Church as I have shown it to be when applied 
to the Bible, because it seems to imply more than can 
either be proved by Scripture or squared with his- 
tory, I do accept the earthly finality of ecclesiastical 
authority for the definition of revealed doctrine; 


and I believe that real loyalty to the teaching and in- 
89 


90 ECCLESIASTICAL RESPONSIBILITY 


ternal discipline of the Catholic Church is certain, 
is alone certain, to secure sufficient knowledge of 
saving truth for the believer’s attainment of eternal 
life with God. 

(a) But my present argument, for obvious rea- 
sons, is not at all based upon appeal to any super- 
natural authority of the Church, or to any alleged 
earthly finality within its sphere of Catholic teach- 
ing. I wish to meet the Modernist contentions 
wholly on natural grounds, and to use arguments 
that can be seen to be relevant even by men who look © 
askance at the Catholic claim. The only ecclesias- 
tical authority to which I shall appeal ts the natural 
authority which belongs to any legitimate orgamzed 
society to define its nature and functions, and to 
determine and enforce its rules of membership and 
oficial tenure in such wise as to protect them from 
unauthorized change. Necessarily this authority 
can be exercised by such society only in its organized 
capacity. Its rules and requirements rest for au- 
- thority on constitutional methods of corporate pre- 
scription; and movements of opinion within the 
society have no legitimate effect in changing its 
requirements unless, and until, they are registered in 
constitutional corporate action. Upon these con- 
ditions the continuance of the society for its consti- 
tutional purposes absolutely depends. 

(b) A second fundamental premise is, that no 


BASES OF ARGUMENT 91 


individual possesses the right either to membership 
or to office in an orgamezation, except upon the basis 
of its constitutionally prescribed conditions and reg- 
ulations. To reject this premise is equivalent to 
rejecting the right of the society to continue being 
what it is.. Some Modernists do indeed take the 
high ground that, since the Church of God is by 
divine appointment the home of all who acknowledge 
Jesus Christ, no additional conditions of member- 
ship may be imposed by that Church. Specious as 
such argument is, it is doubly at fault. In the first 
place, the exclusion of those who refuse to hear 
the Church is as plainly justified by Christ’s author- 
ity as is its being the appointed home of Christians. 
Secondly, such an argument presupposes acceptance 
of the Church’s supernatural status, and this is hope- 
lessly inconsistent with the Modernist standpoint. 
To argue on distinctively Catholic premises is not 
logically permissible unless the Catholic standpoint 
is accepted, and such acceptance is fatal to Modern- 
ism. 


1The late Bishop Creighton said, Persecution and Toler- 
ance, pp. 126, 127, “The Church is a witness to the truth, and 
her primary duty is to see that her witness is true. The 
means by which she is to accomplish that duty is to see that 
no teaching is given under her authority which contradicts 
or impairs the essential elements of that truth committed to 
her charge.” Of those claiming irresponsible liberty he adds, 
quoting from Amiel, “They confuse the right of the in- 
dividual to be free with the duty of the institution to be 
something.” 


92 ECCLESIASTICAL RESPONSIBILITY 


2. Propagandist Function of the Church 


The particular branch of the constitutionally es- 
tablished functions of the Episcopal Church which is 
involved in the presént controversy is the doctrinal ; 
and in defining it I am concerned only with what 
the constitutional language and prescriptions of 
the society named “the Protestant Episcopal Church” 
plainly declare and imply. The official language 
of this Church, contained in canonical legislation 
and the Prayer Book, determines what is its fun- 
damental aim with regard to doctrine, and does 
so im fact, whether the aim thus avowed agrees 
with Scripture and Catholic conceptions or not. 
Personally, of course, I think it does so agree. If 
I did not think so, I would not be an “Episcopalian.” 

The established aim of this Church cannot be 
determined on grounds of value. This Church is, 
and is entitled to be, what it actually has made it- 
self to be up to the present hour, regardless of 
the merits or demerits of its constitution and func- 
tions. It may be in need of reform, of changes in 
its constitutional aims and prescriptions. But what 
its existing constitution makes it to be, this it re- 
mains, regardless of reformatory views and move- 
ments, until corporate action changes it. Modern- 
ists, as such, have no legislative authority. 

Moreover, laxity of discipline within the Church, 


PROPAGANDIST FUNCTION 93 


or the prevalence of a certain amount of toleration 
of unlawful teaching, is not relevant to the ques- 
tion before us, so long as this toleration is simply 
the exercise of wise discretion in taking official cog- 
nizance of canonical offences, and does not obtain 
the form of their specific sanction by corporate leg- 
islation. To argue otherwise is to assume that law 
remains law only when enforced with martinet ex- 
actitude and with entire exclusion of administrative 
discretion. That particular laws can fall into abey- 
ance through general and long-continued neglect 
is true, but the requirements assailed by Modernists 
obviously have incurred no such neglect. Tolera- 
tion has no meaning, except as applied to things con- 
sidered with good reason to be unlawful. My 
point is that even considerable toleration cannot of 
itself alter the law or modify the answer to the 
question as to what the Church officially prescribes. 
The suggestion made in one quarter, that by evading 
the meaning of ecclesiastical language with im- 
punity Modernists can secure precedents that will 
modify the Church’s requirements,? is of course 
contrary to legal principles, and points to ecclesiasti- 
cal chaos rather than to reform. Official non- 
cognizance of law-breaking does not repeal the law 
in question. 

Coming to particulars :-— 

2Dr. D. S. Miller, in The New Republic, Mch. 5, 1924, p. 36. 


94 ECCLESIASTICAL RESPONSIBILITY 


(a) In organizing independently of the mother 
Church, the Episcopal Church embodied in its Prayer 
Book the statement that “this Church is far from 
intending to depart from the Church of England in 
any essential point of doctrine, discipline, or wor- 
ship.” This has reference, of course, to the then 
existing doctrine of the Church of England; and no 
subsequent changes of doctrine in that Church can 
of themselves change our doctrine. Until the lan- 
guage quoted, however, is revised or eliminated, it 
commits us to the essentials of the Anglican posi- 
tion as finally expressed in the Prayer Book of 1662 
—not the personal views of Anglican Reformers, 
but only to that which gained undeniable affirmation 
in official formularies of the English Church. 

(b) Involved in this acceptance of the essentials 
of Anglican doctrine, but also explicitly referred 
to in its prescribed prayers, is acceptance of the doc- 
trine of Christ and of the Apostles and Prophets 
whereon God’s Church is said to have been founded, 


~ elsewhere described as “‘the faith once delivered to 


the saints,’ and linked with “communion of the 
Catholic Church.” 

(c) In harmony with this “communion,” the 
Catholic creeds, called Apostles’ and Nicene, are 
prescribed for affirmation by ministers and laity alike 
in public services; and the Apostles’ Creed is re- 


PROPAGANDIST FUNCTION 95 


quired to be accepted by candidates for Baptism, or 
in their name by their sponsors. 

(d) The doctrine which every candidate for the 
priesthood is pledged by his ecclesiastically prescribed 
ordination vows to teach in his subsequent ministry 
is such as will meet at least three tests: 1. His per- 
sonal persuasion that it is contained in Scripture; 2. 
So ministered “as this Church hath received the 
same’; 3. “To banish and drive away all erroneous 
and strange doctrines contrary to God’s Word.” 
Unless his convictions permit an acknowledgment 
that this Church has correctly received the doctrine 
of Scripture, the candidate cannot fulfil these tests. 

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from all this 
is that this Church’s constitutional prescriptions are 
based upon the assumption that it is charged with 
a propaganda of doctrine once for all received, the 
leading elements of which are embodied in its 
Prayer Book, especially in the so-called Apostles’ 
and Nicene creeds. No room is left for the sup- 
position that what is thus prescribed can be changed 
in its own content and meaning without legislation, 
simply as the result of scholarship; although abund- 
ant room remains for progressive theological sci- 
ence, charged with the task of coordinating the faith 
with the mental context of men’s increasing knowl- 
edge of other things. 


96 ECCLESIASTICAL RESPONSIBILITY 


3. Conditions of Membership 


Membership in the Episcopal Church is, of course, 
voluntary. Even those who have been admitted 
before the age of discretion are free to forsake it 
when they will. But the conditions of membership 
are necessarily prescribed corporately by the Church, 
and acceptance of membership plainly involves ac- 
ceptance of these conditions so long as membership 
is retained. This surely is not open to reasonable 
dispute. 

In relation to the subject under discussion, the 
most significant condition is acceptance of the Cath- 
olic creeds. Even if the proposal to eliminate ac- 
ceptance of the Apostles’ Creed from the Baptismal 
Office should be adopted, the requirement of its 
solemn recitation before God in public worship 
would remain. And, even if this recitation were 
made optional, no member could fulfil the generally 
imposed requirements of public worship without 
being committed at numerous points to the use or 
acceptance of language in which the several doc- 
trines of the creeds are clearly set forth. We can- 
not reasonably think that changes in the require- 
ments of creed recitation can change the scope of 
doctrine to which membership in this Church pub- 
licly commits those who accept it. 

Thus, if members should be admitted on the mere 


CONDITIONS OF MEMBERSHIP 97 


general profession of loyalty to Christ, the detailed 
series of Church doctrines which are set forth either 
directly or indirectly in the forms of worship pre- 
scribed for all members alike would still bear witness 
that the doctrinal conditions of loyal membership are 
what they have been. The Church’s witness to the 
doctrines presupposed in her discipline is too mani- 
fold to be eliminated by anything short of revolu- 
tionary reconstruction of its Constitution and Prayer 
Book. And this fact shows how deeply ingrained 
in the Church’s official mind is its sense of duty 
effectively to propagate the faith which it has re- | 
ceived, without substantial change. It colours the 
whole devotional life of the Church. 

But in thus enveloping its members in the atmos- 
phere of received doctrine, and in imposing for com- 
mon use “sound words” of definite meaning, the 
Church has always allowed in its discipline of the 
laity for the incapacity of untrained minds fully to 
enter into the meaning and bearing of the language 
which is prescribed for their use. A common faith 
is imposed upon all, whether clerical or lay; but the 
manner in which in practice it is to be received 
has only this in common, that the language of the 
Church and of the creeds is accepted dutifully with 
confidence in its correctness, whether the believer 
is able fully to understand it or not. This is what 
is conventionally called implicit faith, analogous to 


98 ECCLESIASTICAL RESPONSIBILITY 


the perfectly reasonable faith which teachable chil- 
dren show to their teachers. It carries with it, of 
course, the duty of trying to understand, and then 
of accepting explicitly so far as understanding en- 
ables one to do so. If such growth in understand- 
ing results in reversal of faith, there is an obvious 
refuge—to leave the Church which requires belief 
that the individual in question can no longer retain. 
In practice, no mere layman is ever treated as amen- 
able to doctrinal discipline, unless he engages in 
public opposition to the Church’s faith, thereby com- 
pelling the Church to take measures for protecting 
its propaganda. 


4. Mimsterial Requirements 


The Church’s ministers are official agents of its 
propaganda, and therefore their personal acceptance 
of its doctrine has peculiar importance and receives 
distinct emphasis in the Church’s constitutional re- 
quirements. No one is compelled either to enter 
the ministry or to retain it, so that the conditions 
which the Church for self-protection imposes upon 
its exercise are not correctly described as interfer- 
ences with personal freedom. They limit official 
liberty only—excluding liberty to use an official min- 
istry in a manner opposed to its constitutionally pre- 
scribed purpose of propagating the Church’s doc- 


MINISTERIAL REQUIREMENTS 99 


trine. In brief, the limitations imposed upon the 
Church’s ministers are analogous to those imposed 
upon officials in every organized society, in particu- 
lar in every society having propagandist aims. 

No one is compelled to accept the distinctive prin- 
ciples of any particular political party; but if one 
accepts the position in a party of its recognized 
campaign speaker, he cannot while retaining such 
position justly excuse himself for attacking its prin- 
ciples on the plea of freedom to think for himself. 
He is indeed free to think for himself, but he is 
not free to retain office in a propaganda when such 
thinking has led him to views in vital conflict there- 
with. I am expressing what is usually taken for 
granted among reasonable men. No one ts entitled 
to use the plea of free thinking as excuse for retain- 
ing and using office contrary to its publicly stipulated 
purpose. Accordingly, the Modernist appeal to the 
principle of mental freedom in investigation, opinion 
and expression, precious though that principle be, 
is entirely non-relevant. The issue is one of official 
responsibility—responsibility voluntarily accepted 
and retained, but not justly violated during its re- 
tention. | 

The doctrines which the Church plainly intends 
shall be propagated by its ministers are those which 
it prescribes to be confessed, whether in creed or 
devotional phrase, in its Book of Common Prayer; 


100 ECCLESIASTICAL RESPONSIBILITY 


and no evidence other than these prescriptions is 
needed to prove that the Church’s ministers, simply 
by virtue of their office, are under obligation to 
teach these doctrines. But the Church has taken 
measures to emphasize this obligation by exacting 
pledges, both oral and written, of its faithful accept- 
ance and observance; and has developed judicial 
machinery for the trial of ministers who publicly 
teach contrary to these doctrines. This emphasis, 
it should be observed, is not for the suppression of 
mental freedom but for the safeguarding of an of- 
ficial propaganda. 

The argument that personal persuasion as to what 
is contained in Scripture completely defines the doc- 
trine which a minister is pledged to teach is simply 
mistaken. In the first place, as I have indicated, 
whatever the Church in its Prayer Book prescribes 
to be confessed in creed and devotion is plainly part 
of the propaganda committed to the Church’s min- 
isters for official carrying on. Secondly, the vow to 
teach in agreement with personal persuasion as to 
the doctrine contained in Scripture is supplemented 
by the vow to teach doctrine “as this Church hath 
received the same,’’ and every candidate before or- 
dination is required to subscribe in writing to a 
declaration in which he promises to conform to the 
doctrine, discipline and worship of this Church. In 
brief, the personal conviction which the Church 


MINISTERIAL REQUIREMENTS 101 


stipulates as condition of office-bearing in its propa- 
ganda is that the teaching of Scripture and the doc- 
trine of this Church are in mutual accord, The 
evidence that this is so is really conclusive. 

We have come to the thorny question of the 
honesty of ministerial attacks on the Church’s pre- 
scribed teaching. I dislike this subject greatly, but 
in view of its prominence in the Modernist attack 
on the bishops’ pastoral my book will be incomplete 
unless I say something with reference to it. First 
of all, then, I insist here, as I have done in a pre- 
vious chapter, that the bishops made no charge of 
personal dishonesty, of dishonest intent, against the 
Modernists. The limit of their warning was that 
“to deny or treat as immaterial” belief publicly pro- 
fessed by clergy and laity alike “cannot but expose 
us to the suspicion and the danger of dishonesty 
and unreality.” 

Dishonesty in relation to the use of language re- 
ferred to, according to a well worn moral distinc- 
tion, is material whenever the objective standards of 
honesty are violated, even though the person in- 
volved is entirely honest in intention and does not 
realize the objective bearing of his practice. But 
this violation of objective standards becomes person- 
ally or formally dishonest only when the individual 
concerned is aware of his violation of them. The 
bishops were obviously treating of objective stand- 


102 ECCLESIASTICAL RESPONSIBILITY 


ards of honesty, and of the material aspect of their 
violation; and they spoke undeniable truth when 
they treated the attack on doctrines professed in the 
creeds as violating the standards referred to, and as 
exposing its violators to the suspicion and danger 
of dishonesty, that is, of personal dishonesty. That 
such danger is thus actualized in Modernist practice 
they did not at all assert. I think that most men of 
disinterested standpoint who reckon fully with the 
facts referred to by the bishops will agree with them. 

I think that the Modernists are personally sincere, 
and have really persuaded themselves that the objec- 
tive standards of honesty permit their attack on 
Church doctrine while retaining the Church’s min- 
istry. My contention, and I think I have given 
adequate reasons for it, is that they are patently 
mistaken. The subtleties of their defence show that 
their attitude is at least difficult to square with the 
standards of conduct elsewhere generally accepted. 
Their emphasis on mental integrity in personal in- 
- quiry and open maintenance of its results is not less 
totally irrelevant to questions of official relation to 
a specific propaganda because of the sacredness of 
the mental integrity referred to—a sacredness which 
Churchmen at large generally recognize. And the 
counter charge that men dutifully maintain certain 
of the Church’s doctrines only by sacrificing mental 
integrity may be dismissed as unworthy of notice. 


CLERICAL DISCIPLINE 103 


In the great crowd, there may be insincere defenders 
of orthodox doctrine, but they are certainly excep- 
tions to the rule. 


5. Clerical Discipline 


In relation to clerical discipline in cases of error 
in doctrine, I shall be recapitulating principles al- 
ready defended in these pages when I lay down three 
determinative premises. The first is that the 
Church, considered as an organized propaganda, 
has the right, and for self-protection the necessity, 
of exercising such discipline as will preserve its 
propaganda from disaster. The second is that wise 
discretion will prevent undertaking this discipline 
without urgent reason in each case, a certain amount 
of toleration, or official non-cognizance, of error be- 
ing obviously desirable. The third is that such 
toleration leaves the canon law standing, and 
does not in the slightest degree reduce either the 
obligations of those whose vagaries are ignored or 
the continued validity of the Church’s disciplinary 
legislation. I need not repeat my arguments for 
these propositions. 

The policy of toleration has notably prevailed in 
this Church, and heresy hunting has not been cus- 
tomary with any section of Churchmen, certainly not 
among conservative Churchmen in general. There 


104 ECCLESIASTICAL RESPONSIBILITY 


have been very few heresy trials in our history; and 
each of them has been due to public and obstinate at- 
tacks on fundamental Church doctrine, widely rec- 
ognized as too dangerous in influence to be safely 
ignored. No calm student of the history of this 
Church can truly gainsay this assertion. Some of 
our Modernists, however, attack the whole system of 
trials for heresy as an antiquated form of tyranny. 
Of course, if the Church’s right and necessity to 
protect one of its chief functions from destruction 
by its official agents is real—I need not repeat my 
argument for its reality—the only plausible line of 
argument against heresy trials must be against that 
form of discipline, as distinguished from other 
forms. 

The question, then, is the fitness of heresy trials 
in the Church’s protection of its propaganda against 
destructive attacks by its ministers. A common 
objection is the scandal involved and the fact that a 
heresy trial advertises the heretical doctrine in the 
Church at large. It is a realization of these at- 
tendant evils which explains the reluctance with 
which the Church proceeds in this manner ; but there 
are counter considerations. The scandal of publicly 
avowed heresy on the part of a Church minister 
already exists, and failure to meet the emergency 
in a manner equally observable by the faithful both 
increases the scandal and confuses the faith of many. 


CLERICAL DISCIPLINE 105 


Moreover, if a heresy trial advertises heresy, it also 
makes clear, if conviction results, that it is heresy— 
a fact important under the circumstances for the 
faithful to know. There is the argument of charity 
for the minister put on trial, an argument which ap- 
plies to the need of sympathetic methods of dealing 
with him so long as there is any prospect of his re- 
covery, but ceases to apply in case of obstinacy. It 
is false charity to favour an obdurate offending min- 
ister at the cost of obscuring the Church’s teaching 
to the faithful at large. 

In the discussion of heresy trials a vital aspect of 
their purpose is widely overlooked. The right of 
a defendant to be heard by his peers before being 
dealt with by his superiors as guilty is involved; 
and it is respect for this right which leads the Church 
to provide for heresy trials rather than permit its 
bishops to discipline heretical ministers without trial. 
If trials were wholly abolished only two alternatives 
would remain—either a private and autocratic 
method of episcopal procedure, which would be 
more open to attack than that of a trial, or the 
Church’s renunciation of right to protect its pro- 
paganda by discipline even in the most extreme 
emergencies, a course which in time would destroy 
that propaganda. Truth is no doubt mighty and 
will finally prevail; but its present clear publication 
to the faithful is a controlling purpose in the whole 


106 ECCLESIASTICAL RESPONSIBILITY 


constitution and canon law of the Episcopal Church. 
To surrender this purpose would be revolutionary. 
In the meantime, it determines in fundamental par- 
ticulars the obligations of ministers and laymen 
alike. : 


CHAPTER XII 
THE CATHOLIC CREEDS 
1. Modernist View of Them 


Tue Modernist rejection of the permanent validity 
of any possible dogmatic definitions comes to a head 
in relation to this Church’s imposition of the so- 
called Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. Modernists ac- 
knowledge their value as registering important stages 
of doctrinal development in the Church; but con- 
sider that modern knowledge and thought have 
transcended them, and that they cannot be sincerely 
accepted to-day unless freedom is given to interpret 
them symbolically. Many Modernists would prefer 
to have their public recitation abolished, and would 
like them to be put away in ecclesiastical archives. 
Before discussing their views and proposals, how- 
ever, it is desirable to give a brief summary of the 
development, purpose and characteristics of these 
creeds. 


2. Their Development 


Both of them represent in their existing forms 


the development of earlier and briefer local creeds, 
107 


108 THE CATHOLIC CREEDS 


this development consisting partly of insertions de- 
signed to shut out certain heresies, and partly of 
such as were involved in the process by which other 
Eastern creeds gave way to that called “Nicene,” 
and other Western creeds were displaced by that 
called “Apostles’.””? The Old Roman Creed, from 
which the latter developed, was certainly in estab- 
lished use before 150 A.D. Zahn dates it as far 
back as I20 A.D., and Kattenbusch 100 a.pv. It 
corresponds in general structure to our Apostles’ 
Creed, and contains the articles of the Virgin Birth 
and Resurrection of our Lord and of the resurrec- 
tion of the flesh. Creeds of corresponding structure 
were in use in the East in the third century, the dates 
of their origin being obscure; and those of Czesarea 
and Jerusalem afforded basis for the text of the 
Nicene Creed. The article on the Virgin Birth 
first appears in this creed in the form accepted in 
451 A.D. by the Council of Chalcedon, although that 
doctrine is known to have been handed down in the 
East at least from sub-apostolic days. It is clear 
that the names ‘Nicene’ and “Apostles’”’ do not 
determine the origin of either creed in its final form. 


1Qn the Apostles’ Creed, see H. B. Swete, Apos. Creed; 
A. E. Burn, Apos. Creed; and Introd. to the Hist. of the 
Creeds; C. H. Turner, Hist. of the Use of Creeds and 
Anathemas in the Early Church. On the Nicene Creed: E. 
C. S. Gibson, The Three Creeds; Encyc. of Relig. and Ethics, 
g.u.; F. J. A. Hort, Two Dissertations. 


THEIR PURPOSE 109 


None the less, both agree with apostolic tradition; 
and the existing Nicene Creed, except for the West- 
ern addition of the Holy Spirit’s procession from 
the Son, Filioque, runs true with that adopted 
by the Council of Nicea, 325 a.p. The inclusion 
of the Virgin Birth at Chalcedon was not an inno- 
vation on previous consent. 

The early creeds above mentioned owed their 
origin to the need of authoritative terms in the in- 
struction of catechumens or candidates for Baptism. 
This need is reflected in the New Testament in the 
exhortation to “hold fast to the form of sound 
words’’;? and this exhortation may reasonably be 
taken to show that the process which gave birth to 
creeds began in apostolic days. Their basis, argu- 
ing from their common structure, appears to have 
been the trinitarian language of our Lord’s baptismal 
commission to the Apostles. During the age of 
persecution, previous to the decree of toleration, 
313 A.D., however, it was not considered safe to 
commit these creeds to writing; and this largely ex- 
plains the obscurity of their earliest history. 


3. The Purpose 


Their original purpose, then, was to afford ac- 
curate instruction of candidates for Baptism in the 


SUD atv ayia 3) 
3St. Matt. xxviii, I9. 


110 THE CATHOLIC CREEDS 


more determinative particulars of the common faith 
which they were required to profess before being 
admitted to Christian fellowship. It is true that 
in the earliest years after Pentecost converts were 
freely admitted to Baptism on simple acknowledg- 
ment of Jesus Christ as Lord, along with the safe- 
guard of their continuing “stedfastly in the Apos- 
tles’ teaching and fellowship, and in the breaking of 
bread and the prayers.” * But erroneous ideas of 
Christian doctrine soon began to trouble the Church; 
and in developing the original acceptance of Christ 
as Lord into a more definitive “form of sound 
words,’ the apostolic Church was profiting by ex- 
perience. 

History clearly shows that the danger which thus 
led to the development and general requirement of 
a more definitive profession of faith in the primitive 
Church is a continuing one; and it was never more 
in evidence than to-day. The present agitation for 
reducing this requirement plainly grows out of de- 
sire to escape the anciently recognized obligation of 
Christians to accept the primitive faith fully and 
without reserve. In final analysis, the objection to 
imposing definitive creeds represents objection to 
responsibility for a definite and determinative faith. 
It is certain that to remove from the Office for 
Baptism the requirement of acceptance of the 


4Acts il, 42. 


SOME CHARACTERISTIC ASPECTS = 111 


articles of the Apostles’ Creed would be interpreted 
by Modernists as exempting the baptized from such 
responsibility. 


4. Some Characteristic Aspects 


(a) The Apostles and Nicene Creeds are limited 
im scope, and do not define every doctrine contained 
in the Church’s faith. For example, the doctrine 
concerning the Holy Eucharist, given in the Cat- 
echism, is not there mentioned. They were never 
intended to be exhaustive, and include only the lead- 
ing articles of faith. By “leading” articles | mean 
such as are sufficiently central and determinative to 
lead those who rightly accept them to implicit ac- 
ceptance at least of the rest of the faith. Right 
acceptance means of course dutiful and loyal ac- 
ceptance, growing out of conversion and grace and 
characterized by readiness to believe all the faith 
implicitly at least, and explicitly so far as as- 
certained. A grudging faith is foreign to the 
Christian mind. 

(b) This limitation of scope exhibits the caution 
of the Church in formally defining its doctrine in 
fixed terms. Its dogmas are confined to what is 
most central and most in need of protection from 
misleading definition. By comparing the Catholic 
creeds with modern Confessions of Faith we shall 
see how severe this self-restraint has been. 


112 THE CATHOLIC CREEDS 


(c) The rise of heresies led in the period of the 
Ecumenical Councils to the insertion of terms bor- 
rowed from current use, and reflecting Greek forms 
of thought, and many moderns complain of their 
metaphysical implications. This complaint is not 
justified, for in inserting the terms in question the 
Church did not affirm any other doctrine than that 
already contained in the Creed and received from 
the Apostles. It used them patently and exclusively 
to make clear in terms incapable of evasion the full 
Deity of Christ and His unity of being with God the 
Father. To read more into these terms is to con- 
fuse their use in the creed with their use in other 
contexts. 

(d) The creeds in time came to be recited in 
public services, because of their notable fitness for 
devotional use; and that fitness is gloriously ap- 
parent to all who truly accept them. But their public 
recitation has become an important safeguard of 
faith in the midst of modern confusion. To abolish 
or make optional this recitation—especially if it 
were done on Modernist grounds—would be to 
weaken the Church’s witness, and would give the im- 
pression that acceptance of the creeds has ceased to 
be taught by the Church as necessary. The results 
might well be chaotic and revolutionary. 


CHAPTER XIII 
INTERPRETATION OF THE CREEDS 
1. The Modermst Plea 


Untit recently it has been generally taken for 
granted that when a Church requires specific doc- 
trinal professions from its members or ministers, 
the making of these professions signifies acceptance 
of the doctrine originally meant to be expressed and 
imposed by them. Accordingly, no one has been 
supposed to make such professions sincerely unless he 
has intended to accept this doctrine without reserve. 
Modernists, however, have developed a novel theory 
concerning these professions and obligations. They 
have persuaded themselves (a) that no dogmatic 
definitions can be permanently valid in their original 
meaning; (b) that even conservative Churchmen do 
not accept all the articles of the Catholic creeds with 
unchanged meaning; (c) that in openly interpreting 
and accepting some of them symbolically, and in 
other than their original sense, they are simply using 
avowedly a liberty for which the general, although 

113 


114 INTERPRETATION OF THE CREEDS 


unreflecting and therefore unavowed, practice of to- 
day affords precedent and justification. 

I have already expressed the opinion that they 
have really persuaded themselves on these lines, and 
that they are honest in their present course and ar- 
gument. None the less, it seems plain that their 
argument is doubly open to suspicion in not being 
wholly disinterested, and in setting novel subtleties 
against the normal, readily perceived and generally 
accepted purpose and meaning of doctrinal sub- 
scriptions. It is entirely clear that this Church has 
intended to propagate without substantial change a 
faith which it holds to have been once for all de- 
livered and to have been correctly defined in its 
leading elements in the Catholic creeds. It is also 
certain that a main intention of this Church’s im- 
position of ministerial subscriptions and ordination 
vows is to protect the propaganda of the ancient 
faith from change. No one who has not been en- 
veloped in confusing sophistications is likely to 
deny this. In brief, the Modernist argument in this 
matter really makes for an ingenious but unwar- 
ranted evasion of the official intention of the Church 
as embodied in its constitutional legislation. And 
it is the Church’s constitutionally established pur- 
pose, rather than Modernist contentions, that must 
determine what is involved for loyal Churchmen in 
its imposition of the Catholic creeds. 


PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION | 115 


2. Fixed and Progressive Interpretation 


(a) The Modernist plea for liberty to interpret 
the creeds progressively cannot rightly be understood 
without clearing up the meaning of the term “‘inter- 
pretation.” To interpret a formulary or law may, 
and tn official use ordinarily does, sigmfy to ascertain 
and define the precise meaning of tt considered in 1t- 
self, the meaning with which it was actually imposed. 
This use of the term appears in judicial interpreta- 
tion of civil law. The aim in this is to determine 
the meaning of the law itself, the provable meaning 
of its actual language. The effective meaning of a 
law is considered to be determined by its language, 
closely scrutinized, regardless of sentiments and in- 
tentions which are not provably expressed therein. 
Thus the so-called “joker,” or phrase secretly in- 
terpolated in a law contrary to the intention of the 
majority, is reckoned as part of the law and deter- 
minative of its meaning. Moreover, the courts 
assume that this meaning, the legislative result, re- 
mains unchanged until subsequent legislation either 
_ amends or repeals the law. 

Similarly, to interpret an imposed formulary of 
faith in relation to its effect on canonical obligation, 
is to define the meaning of the formulary itself, the 
provable meaning of its language as therein used 
and thereby imposed. It is not concerned either 


116 INTERPRETATION OF THE CREEDS 


with opinions prevailing when the formulary was 
adopted or with bearings and inferences likely to be 
made from it in any current state of knowledge 
concerning related matters, except so far as ex- 
plicitly and provably expressed by the language of 
the formulary itself. Only this provable meaning 
of the language employed has ecclesiastical force,* 
but it retains this force so long as the formulary 
is imposed without amendment. The ecclesiastical 
courts thus normally “interpret” the creeds; and it 
was in this sense that our bishops in 1894-5 rightly 
declared that “‘fixedness of interpretation is of the 
essence of the creeds.’’* Unless it were so, their im- 
position could have no continuing value for protect- 
ing doctrine from subversion—a reductio ad absur- 
dum. 

(b) There is another use of the word “inter- 
pretation,” however, that which includes in tts refer- 
ence not only the meaning of the document itself, 
strictly taken, but also all tts apparent bearings and 
implications when regarded from the standpoint of 
current knowledge and opimon on other subjects. 
Inasmuch as such knowledge increases and as a 
result many accepted opinions undergo change and 
correction, this kind of interpretation also changes, 


1 The Church does indeed teach a wider range of doctrine, 
but not by creed prescription. 
2 Journal of the General Convention of 1895, p. 417. 


PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION 117 


growing more rich and intelligent as the ages roll on. 
In this sense, accordingly, interpretation of the 
creeds is progressive. 

To illustrate, the Apostles’ Creed says, “I be- 
lieve in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth,” 
enlarged in the Nicene Creed by the explanatory 
phrase, “And of all things visible and invisible.”’ 
If we interpret in the first sense, the meaning of the 
article itself, we find the doctrine that God is the 
maker of all things, and that is what it means as 
long as the article retains its existing phraseology. 
But most ancient Christians also believed that the 
world was made in six days, and that the existing 
forms of organic life were then given their abid- 
ing characters. Therefore they put the doctrine 
that God is maker of all into the context of these 
opinions concerning the manner of creation, and did 
not often distinguish between the article of faith and 
the opinions in which they enveloped it. Accord- 
ingly, when modern science discredited these extra- 
neous opinions, it seemed to many Christian believers 
that science was opposed to the article of faith con- 
cerning creation. Theologians, however, have been 
led to distinguish and to see that what is really dis- 
credited is the extraneous body of opinion concern- 
ing the universe which had been read into the creed, 
but which is not at all expressed there. They have 
been led to revise their previous ideas of the bear- 


118 INTERPRETATION OF THE CREEDS 


ings of its language; and in this sense they have 
interpreted the creed progressively, without in the 
least changing the interpretation which has to do 
with the creed’s strict meaning in itself. 

The mistake which Modernists make is to sup- 
pose that the meaning of the creed itself, the doc- 
trine which it provably asserts, is changed becatise 
the mental context in which we receive it, and the 
inferences which our extraneous knowledge and 
opinions lead us to draw from it, have altered. 
They fail, in other words, to define their use of 
“interpret.” They fail to realize that no change of 
context supplied by us can change what the creed 
itself really and provably asserts. The creed does 
not bind, as creed, except in its own strict meaning, 
but in that meaning it continues to bind those who 
accept the creed, as creed, at all. In brief, progres- 
sive interpretation in the sense I have indicated is 
legitimate, provided it is not confused with inter- 
pretation in the stricter sense, and made to involve 
change and reversal of the creed’s own meaning, the 
meaning in which the Church imposes tt. 


3. Symbolical Interpretation 


Modernists declare that no intelligent believers 
now accept all the articles of the creed in their 
original meaning—an assertion which I shall criti- 


SYMBOLICAL INTERPRETATION 119 


cize further on—and argue from this premise that 
the creed cannot retain its original force unless in- 
terpreted symbolically. In discussing this conten- 
tion we need to realize what is at issue. No one 
contends that there is no figurative language in the 
creed. For example, “the right hand of the 
Father’? cannot be, and never has been, taken liter- 
ally by believers in general. The point here main- 
tained is that articles of the creed are to be accepted 
im the sense nm which they were provably imposed, 
whether that sense is literal or figurative. And 
in the past no serious difference of opinion has arisen 
among believers as to what is literal and what is 
figurative. But Modernists contend that the estab- 
lished practice of interpreting certain creed lan- 
guage figuratively leaves us free to apply the same 
method of interpretation to other phrases of the 
creed, for example to the article concerning the 
Virgin Birth. In brief, they plead for a sym- 
bolical interpretation which reverses the original 
and plain meaning of parts of the creed—a branch 
of their use of progressive interpretation to relieve 
themselves from some of their generally acknowl- 
edged responsibility for accepting the creeds in their 
previously accepted meaning. 

The creed has widely been called the “Symbol of 
Faith.” But the word “symbol” as thus used, and 
as generally used among the ancients, does not mean 


120 INTERPRETATION OF THE CREEDS 


metaphor or figure of speech, as opposed to literal 
phrase. It means language which is inadequate to 
express exhaustively the mystery with which it is 
concerned. It is language that is true as far as it 
goes, a “form of sound words” on the subject, but 
which points on to more than can be expressed in 
human language.2 Thus the word “heaven” cor- 
rectly designates the place where Christ is to receive 
His faithful ones forever, and is therefore a per- 
manently valid term. But where heaven is, and any 
exact description of it, are beyond any adequate 
expression. In this use of terms the whole creed 
is “symbolical,” inadequate. But, as far as tt goes, 
it is given as abidingly true; some of it, as being 
concerned with earthly facts, literally so, and some 
of it patently figurative. In either case the mean- 
ing in which it was imposed is the meaning in which 
it is to be accepted. 

Modernists, however, use “symbolical” in the 
sense of non-literal. Thus they claim the right in 
accepting the creeds to interpret the article concerned 
with the Virgin Birth as signifying, not literal fact 
but, the purity and dignity of Him who was in fact 
born of both Joseph and Mary. In brief, they 
reverse the literal and real meaning of that article. 
It is this reversal of the previously acknowledged 
meaning of articles of the creeds, the meaning with 


3.Cf. A. Harnack, Hist. of Dogma, vol. II, p. 144. 


UNCHANGED MEANING OF CREED 121 


which this Church has been understood to impose 
them, which is at issue. Even if, contrary to our 
convictions, we should grant that intelligent men 
can no longer accept the creed in the original mean- 
ing with which patently it has been imposed, the 
fact would remain that only this Church itself has 
authority to determine in what sense the creed is 
to be accepted as condition of membership and 
ministerial office within its spiritual jurisdiction. 
Until this Church, therefore, legislates otherwise, 
the creed retains the meaning with which it was 
originally received and imposed in our Book of 
Common Prayer. The Modernist movement has 
no effect whatever in changing the Church’s plain 
constitutional requirements, as they have been 
hitherto understood by Churchmen in_ general. 
Arguments and demands do not change the canon 
law; and until it is changed it determines the re- 
quirements of loyalty for those who seek to retain 
their place or office in this Church. 


4. Unchanged Meaning of the Creed 


I now come to reckon with the Modernist asser- 
tion that no intelligent Churchmen of any school 
accept all the articles of the creed in their ancient 
meaning. I begin by recalling the very real differ- 
ence between the provable meaning of the language 


122 INTERPRETATION OF THE CREEDS 


employed in the creed and the mental context of cur- 
rent knowledge and opinion to which believers of 
each successive age seek to relate its several articles. 
The theology that has been built up around the creed 
is a progressive science and has changed with the 
changes of general knowledge and opinion. And 
because the difference between what is required to 
be believed by the creed and the inferences and bear- 
ings which each generation has linked up therewith 
has not usually been clearly kept in mind in 
Christian thought, Modernists have easily over- 
looked it. They treat every change in theological 
comment on the creed as signifying a change in the 
meaning which the creed itself has for successive 
generations of believers. My contention is that, 
amid all changes of mental context and associated 
opinion in which its several articles have been re- 
ceived, the creed’s own provable meaning remains. 
And it still defines without change beliefs to which 
Christians in general regard themselves to be com- 
mitted when they accept the creed. No doubt they 
also in many cases read into the creed more than 
it contains. But what it really has contained and 
meant in itself it still accepted by them. 

The affirmations of the Apostles’ Creed are of 
three kinds. 

(a) One of them has to do with historic events 
witnessed and attested by our Lord’s parents and 


UNCHANGED MEANING OF CREED 123 


the apostolic writers: His birth of the Virgin 
Mary, suffering under Pontius Pilate, crucifixion, 
death, burial, rising again on the third day from 
the dead, and that part of His ascension into heaven 
that was observed by His disciples—into a cloud. 
That these events were originally, and still are, in- 
tended to be affirmed as literal facts—that such is 
the real meaning of their assertion in the creed—is 
too clear to be explained away by “‘symbolical’’ in- 
terpretation, however spiritual such interpretation 
may be made to appear. Being affirmations of fact 
susceptible of observation, originally based upon 
firsthand testimony seriously meant to be literal, they 
must be taken literally and either accepted as true 
or rejected as untrue. This has been the manner 
of their treatment from the beginning; and the 
Modernist attempt to impose a “symbolical” iter- 
pretation on such of them as require supernatural 
factors for their occurrence 1s plainly not due to a 
better understanding of the creed. It 1s due to a 
priori considerations and to the influence of modern 
naturalistic or semi-naturalistic presuppositions; and 
the new interpretations reverse the meaning of the 
creed with reference to the Virgin Birth, the Resur- 
rection and the Ascension. They deny facts notori- 
ously meant to be asserted by the creed as facts. 
The great bulk of those who profess to accept 
the creed, accept these factual assertions in thew 


124 INTERPRETATION OF THE CREEDS 


ancient and original intent. It is idle to deny this. 

(b) Another class of affirmations deals with 
truths lying back of these facts, truths revealed by 
Christ and His Holy Spirit, which declare some- 
what of the nature of God and of His purpose for 
mankind, and which help us to perceive why the 
events referred to were brought to pass. Thus in 
each of the three main sections of the creed we ex- 
press our belief in one of the divine Persons, re- 
ferring to each in terms not proper to mere crea- 
tures, but none the less consistent with the truth 
specifically mentioned in the Nicene Creed, that 
there is only “‘one God.” In the Nicene Creed the 
true Deity of Christ, His distinctness from, and one- 
ness in being with, the Father, are declared in tech- 
nical terms borrowed from ancient usage, no longer 
current; but that nothing beyond these truths was 
affirmed or intended to be affirmed is made clear 
both by fair examination of the creed itself and by 
consideration of the Arian heresy that historically 
was intended to be excluded. 

The affirmations of this class include also our 
Lord’s conception by the Holy Ghost, His descent 
into hell, ascent into heaven, and sitting at God’s 
right hand; and that Christ will come again to judge 
the living and the dead, that there is forgiveness of 
sins, that the flesh will rise, and that there will be 
everlasting life. The Nicene Creed adds _ that 


UNCHANGED MEANING OF CREED | 125 


Christ’s second coming will be “with glory,’ cer- 
tain ascriptions to the Spirit that have undergone no 
change in meaning, and that Baptism is for remis- 
sion of sins. 

With regard to the descent into hell and ascent 
into heaven, Modernists say that to the ancients and 
medizevals this meant local descent into the interior 
of the earth and local ascent into a region above 
the clouds; whereas we do not give either hell or 
heaven any such localization. ‘The correct state- 
ment is that the earlier views referred to are not ex- 
plicit in the creed, but were read into it from popu- 
lar cosmology. The words “descended” and “as- 
cended” were used even in ancient days in both the 
local-direction sense and the purely spiritual one; 
and the only affirmations provably contained in these 
articles—no other have ever been binding—are that 
Christ went to hell and went to heaven. In these 
meanings conservative believers still accept these 
articles; and the current interpretation of hell as the 
place of departed spirits is not modern in origin. 
The ascent into heaven, so far as physically meant, 
has always been taken as referring to the Gospel 
fact of our Lord’s visible levitation into a cloud; 
and in ultimate reference, this visible movement has 
been generally regarded as a sign of His withdrawal 
into God’s invisible heaven. No view concerning 
either the locality or the local nature of hell and 


126 INTERPRETATION OF THE CREEDS 


heaven can be proved ever to have had the authority 
of a Catholic creed. 

The phrase “resurrection of the flesh,” as the 
original of the Apostles’ Creed reads, has very 
limited content, and this content is not at all 
changed by substituting, as the English have done, 
“body” for “flesh,” carmis. In either case the as- 
sertion is that the inferior visible part of our na- 
ture, as well as the superior invisible part, will rise. 
In what state and under what antecedent conditions 
it will rise is not even hinted at. The word “flesh” 
may have been chosen to accentuate the distinctness 
of that which is referred to from its inhabiting 
spirit. The substituted “body” seems to accentuate 
the organic aspect. But both designate the same 
thing, and concerning that thing nothing is asserted 
except its resurrection. In that its only provable 
meaning both ancient and modern believers have ac- 
cepted this article. The change of interpretation re- 
ferred to by Modernists has been confined to the 
inferences deduced from the article, to passing opin- 
ions not expressed in the creed. In the then state 
of physical knowledge the ancients supposed that 
a resurrection of the flesh requires a reassemblage 
of its constituent particles; and, controlled by this 
notion, they developed a theory of the resurrection 
which modern knowledge has discredited. Modern 
theology also puts greater stress on the scriptural 


UNCHANGED MEANING OF CREED 127 


truth, neither stated nor precluded by the creed, 
that in the resurrection, ‘‘when this mortal shall have 
put on immortality,” our bodies will be marvelously 
changed. So it is that, while our theological treat- 
ment of the “resurrection of the flesh” greatly dif- 
fers from that of the ancients, we accept that article 
itself in the only provable meaning it ever has had. 

(c) The third kind of affirmation in the creed 
includes ‘‘the Holy Catholic Church” and ‘‘the com- 
munion of saints.” These go together, and have 
always been taken in the same sense except among 
modern Protestants. The “Catholic Church’ desig- 
nates the visible Church organized by the Apostles 
and acknowledged by the Ecumenical Councils. In 
that we still profess to believe when we recite the 
creeds. The “communion of saints” referred when 
inserted, and is still taken to refer, to the relations 
which bind together the baptized members of 
Christ’s Catholic Church. The emphasis has some- 
times been on earthly fellowship, but more com- 
monly on the uninterrupted communion between 
living and departed saints. The word “saint’’ in 
both scriptural and ancient Christian use is an or- 
dinary designation of the baptized, reckoned as sanc- 
tified, consecrated to God. 

The conclusion of the matter is that the Modern- 
ist assertion that no section of Churchmen accepts 
the articles of the creed in their original ancient 


128 INTERPRETATION OF THE CREEDS 


meaning is mistaken. It is based upon failure to 
distinguish between what these articles, strictly scru- 
tinized, provably affirm and the speculative and 
changing theological opinions that have been linked 
up with them in the several stages of men’s ad- 
vance in general knowledge. 


CHAPTER XIV 
THE FULL GODHEAD OF CHRIST 
1. The Nicene Doctrine 


The Nicene Creed defines the traditional Christian 
doctrine as to Christ’s Person as follows: “One 
Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son of God; 
Begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of 
God, Light of Light, Very God of very God; Be- 
gotten, not made; Being of one substance with the 
Father; By whom all things were made.” 

This language, especially the phrase, “Being of 
one substance with the Father,” is objected to by 
Modernists as including metaphysical ideas in the 
faith. This is a mistake. Whatever may have 
been the previous metaphysical associations of the 
terms in question, they had become current coin 
among the intelligent of all schools. Their mean- 
ing in the creed is necessarily determined by their 
context, and by the intention there manifest of as- 
serting as unambiguously as possible the truth that 
Jesus Christ is not less to be identified in being with 

| 129 


130 THE FULL GODHEAD OF CHRIST 


the one God because personally distinct from the 
Father. The background—I do not mean the con- 
tent—of the language used is twofold: the infinite 
otherness of God and creatures; and the trinitarian 
doctrine that in the one and only divine and indivisi- 
ble Being there are three distinct although mutually 
inseparable personal Subjects, the Father, the Son, 
and the Holy Spirit. Modernists criticize both of 
these premises. Obviously I cannot discuss their 
criticisms in detail in a book of this kind. I only 
need to say that in assailing the essential otherness 
of Godhead and manhood, they reveal clearly how 
fundamental is their departure from the Christian 
faith, since it leads to a reduced idea of God Him- 
self. The notion that this infinite otherness of na- 
ture must preclude the assumption of real manhood 
by very God is purely a prion. The Christian 
doctrine from New Testament days has been that 
such assumption actually took place when the eternal 
Son condescended to be born of the Virgin Mary. 


2. Anticipated in the New Testament 


In thus defining the doctrine of Christ’s Person 
the Nicene fathers were compelled, in order to shut 
out new errors, to use new terms; but the aim to 
which they adhered, was simply to declare the doc- 


ANTICIPATED IN NEW TESTAMENT 131 


trine handed down from the Apostles by common 
tradition of the Churches. The Apostles had re- 
ceived their doctrine by supernatural revelation from 
Christ and His Holy Spirit; and they received it 
by a complex process having several stages, and not 
completed during our Lord’s earthly life.* 

(a) The manner of the Man as observed at close 
range in daily intimacy—truly human, indeed, but 
exhibiting a spiritual transcendence of character 
and a sovereignty in every word and work that 
could not have sat naturally upon Him, as it did, if 
He had been merely human. 

(b) His amazing personal claims, unendurably 
presumptuous if He was not personally divine, but 
made entirely convincing by His moral perfection, 
transparent truthfulness, mental balance and super- 
human wisdom. 

(c) His unique resurrection from the dead, which 
among its other bearings declared Him to be “the 
Son of God with power.” 

By their observance of these things our Lord’s 
disciples had gradually come to a manner and degree 
of unreserved self-committal and devotion to Him | 
which may not rightly be yielded to any other than 
the Supreme Being. They were treating Him as 


1QOn this process, see Bishop Gore, Belief in Christ, esp. 
chh. ii-iv. 


1322 THE FULL GODHEAD OF CHRIST 


God. But this attitude was implicit rather than 
the outcome of an articulate Christology. That 
could not come until the self-manifestation of 
Christ could be reflected on in the light of the 
demonstrative work and guidance of the Spirit. 
Accordingly, there was another stage. 

(d) The outpouring of spiritual power and felt 
personal regeneration that was perceived and ex- 
perienced in the apostolic Church, recognized in the 
light of Christ’s promises and of the Spirit’s pente- 
costal descent in tongues of fire to be from their 
ascended Master. 

It is customary to describe the process of develop- 
ment of the Apostles’ definitive realization of what 
their experience of, and established attitude towards, 
Christ signified with regard to His rank in being 
as having three stages—the Petrine, Pauline, and 
Johannine. We should notice, however, that these 
were stages in a spiritually guided and _ self- 
consistent progress in articulating the meaning of 
an implicit faith and attitude towards Christ which 
had become entirely and abidingly established with 
the | pentecostal descent of ‘the ,Spirit: >The 
Johannine Christology was implicit in the Petrine. 
The contention, therefore, that there were three 
different Christologies in the apostolic Church— 
adoptionist, preéxistent-Christ, and Logos—is to 
confuse stages in the unfolding of one Christology 


ANTICIPATED IN NEW TESTAMENT 133 


with mutually independent developments. There is 
no trace of controversy touching Christ’s Person 
among the leaders of the apostolic Church, such as 
would have certainly been in evidence if the view 
I am criticizing were true. And it is fatuous to 
treat St. Peter’s opening missionary sermon—pat- 
ently apologetical, and addressed to people who 
would have been startled and shocked by being 
told that Christ was God—as if it were a full ex- 
position of his belief concerning the Person of 
Christ. 

The doctrine of Christ’s divine Person had to 
be taught in language consistent with the established 
truth of divine unity. Accordingly, to the end, even 
while declaring with increasing clearness the divine 
rank of Christ, the apostolic writers habitually 
designated and described Him, and the Holy Spirit 
as well, in terms of relationship to the Father— 
thus providing their successors with the materials 
which were gradually coordinated in the formula 
of the Trinity. 

It ought to be clear, in view of what I have 
pointed out in this section, that the Christology of 
the Nicene Creed, in spite of its developed term- 
inology, adds nothing to the undeniable and self- 
consistent teaching of the New Testament in ascrib- 
ing the eternal Godhead of the Father to His Son 
Jesus Christ. 


134 THE FULL GODHEAD OF CHRIST 


3. “Different Gates to One Faith” 


Supporters of Modernism define their position as 
a mental attitude rather than a doctrine, and point 
to the fact that Modernists can be found who have 
made no important departure from traditional doc- 
trine. This seems encouraging until we examine 
this “mental attitude.” It is one of refusal to 
reckon seriously with authority and the main stream 
of Christian tradition. The premise adopted is that 
the progress of human knowledge and thought, of 
science and criticism, precludes resting in the finality 
of a faith given long ago, of dogmas based upon 
conceptions of God and His world now entirely 
outgrown. If such an attitude is not doctrinal in 
the sense of signifying or involving any positive 
doctrinal platform, it is none the less decidedly doc- 
trinal in its negative aspects. Its premise, if it 
were valid, would justify the position, actually 
adopted by the more consistent Modernists, that 
what is called the faith once for all delivered is in 
need of substantial revision and reconstruction, just 
because developed in a remote, unscientific and un- 
critical age. The traditional assumption that the 
faith came to men through supernatural revelation 
rather than human discovery, and therefore does not 
depend for its validity upon the results of human 
investigation, is not seriously reckoned with. It is 


“DIFFERENT GATES TO ONE FAITH” 135 


rejected by consistent Modernists, who treat tradi- 
tional doctrines as mere hypotheses, registers of 
previous stages in progressive thought, now needing 
revision, in certain cases sheer reversal. 

Some of our American supporters of the Modern- 
ist cause, including Dr. Parks, seem to be oblivious 
of this, the real standpoint and attitude of Modern- 
ism. They fondly suppose that Modernism repre- 
sents merely freedom of scholarship and the right 
to reckon with modern knowledge in theological de- 
velopment. They have unwittingly allied themselves 
with anti-Christian forces. Consistent Modernists 
definitely reject the miraculous events affirmed in 
the creed, and their symbolical interpretation is a 
reversal, rather than a more intelligent acceptance, 
of its several doctrines, including that of our Lord’s 
preexistent Godhead. | 

Dr. Bowie entirely overlooks the Modernist novel 
and misleading use of terms when he writes, “Con- 
servative and liberal alike would agree that in Him 
they find the fulness of the godhead bodily, and that 
God was in Christ reconciling the world to Him- 
self. But the difference has to do with the ques- 
tion of approaches, whether one or more than one, 
by which men enter into this conviction of God in 
Christ.” 2 The text ‘‘God was in Christ,” etc. is 


2 “Nifferent Gates to One Faith,” in The Forum, June, 1924, 
p. 760. 


136 THE FULL GODHEAD OF CHRIST. 


being used to-day in support of the Unitarian view 
that God dwelt in the purely human person Jesus, 
and thus used Him for reconciling the world to 
Himself. They also similarly use the text, “the ful- 
ness of the Godhead,” revealed in Him. Moreover, 
the term Godhead does not mean for Modernists, as 
it has always meant for Christian believers, a unique 
and infinite nature differing in kind from anything 
that can become the property of a human personal 
subject.® 

Modernists frequently assail the traditional Chris- 
tian view of Godhead as making an impassable gulf 
between God and man, and insist upon the view 
that Godhead and Manhood are one nature in Christ. 
The doctrine of two natures they call “hopelessly 
dualistic.” Dr. Drown writes, ‘““The difference be- 
tween God and man is not a difference in attributes, 
but in source. God gives all, and man can receive 
all. The Christian belief in God and in man leads 
to the belief in the complete unity of God and man. 
The accomplishment of that unity in Jesus Christ is 
the Incarnation.”’* In two of the Essays recently 
produced by the faculty of the Cambridge Divinity 
School, it is maintained that the doctrine of our 

8 The modern contention that the difference is one of de- 
gree, also that the unity of Christ with the Father is to be 
described in terms of will rather than of substance, is effec- 


tively criticized by R. A. Knox, Some Loose Stones, ch. viii. 
4E. S. Drown, The Creative Christ, p. 86. 


“DIFFERENT GATES TO ONE FAITH” § 137 


Lord’s personal preéxistence disagrees with the 
Virgin Birth narratives, which teach, they allege, 
that Christ derived His being from human birth.° 
If Christ was not preéxistent—Dr. Drown is con- 
tent with the “thought that all this preéxistent di- 
vine activity is summed up in Jesus Christ” °—He 
could not be what Christians have always meant in 
calling Him divine. 

Dr. Bowie’s eirenicon is only a verbal platform. 
If it were subscribed to by genuine Modernists and 
genuine conservatives, their united subscriptions 
would not signify agreement. It would conceal very 
fundamental disagreement in the most central article 
of the Christian faith. Moreover, on the Modern- 
ist side it would represent what is called Neologism, 
a new use of the terms previously and generally 
employed and understood to express traditional doc- 
trine. It is this manipulation of words—called 
“progressive interpretation’? when applied to the 
creeds—which puts every eirenicon offered in Mod- 
ernist interests under suspicion. The question is not 
what skilfully formed verbiage is accepted by Mod- 


5Creeds and Loyalty, by Seven Members of the Faculty 
of Cambridge Theol. School, pp. 61, 78. 

6 Op. cit., p. 89. Other illustrations of reduced Modernist 
Christology can be found in Frederic Palmer, The Virgin 
Birth, pp. 23-31; H. D. A. Major, in The Modern Churchman, 
Sept., 1921, pp. 195 ff.; and several of the conference papers 
given in the same issue of that magazine, esp. that of the 
late Dr. Rashdall. 


138 THE FULL GODHEAD OF CHRIST 


ernists, but what does the verbiage mean? Have 
real Modernists abandoned the doctrine of Christ’s 
eternal being and Godhead—the doctrine, that is, 
which in the ages gone by has constituted the most 
central and distinguishing element of the Christian 
faith? The evidence that they have done so is suf- 
ficiently extensive and convincing. 

I do not mean that Dr. Bowie, Dr. Parks and 
some of the others who are rallying to the defence of 
Modernism reject the Christian doctrine referred 
to. I mean that these gentlemen are undesignedly 
lending help to an anti-Christian movement. Mod- 
ernism is a term that has been appropriated very 
definitely to signify what I have shown it to signify 
in my second chapter. Recent attempts to use the 
term as designating merely an openminded outlook 
simply obscure the issues involved in that most vital 
controversy now going on between those who be- 
lieve and those who reject several most central ar- 
ticles of the Christian faith. The point of view of 
genuine Modernism is hopelessly inconsistent with 
the historic Christian faith, and no truly Christian 
believer can profess acceptance of it without putting 
himself in a false light. The Modernist and the con- 
servative positions are not “gates to one faith.” 
They are mutually discordant faiths, and their verbal 
agreement in accepting Christ conceals a disagree- 
ment concerning His Person too radical safely to 


“DIFFERENT GATES TO ONE FAITH” 139 


be ignored. In the hitherto accepted, or historically 
Christian, sense of words, true Modernists do not 
accept Jesus Christ as very God, or even as person- 
ally existent previously to His human birth. 


CHAPTER XV. 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH 
1. Standpoints 


RELATEDNESS to the general course of events, as 
has been explained in a previous chapter, is a nec- 
essary condition of credibility of such a fact as that 
of the Virgin Birth; but if this relatedness is to 
be discerned by us, we must assume the standpoint 
from which alone it becomes apparent. This stand- 
point is determined by two premises: (a) that the 
strictly miraculous nature of an event does not of 
itself make such an event contrary to nature, contra 
naturam, or a breach of continuity in the divine 
drama of which the phenomena generalized by nat- 


1 There is a large literature on both sides. Dr. Parks gives 
most of the adverse arguments, which are more fully given 
by Paul Lobstein, The Virgin Birth of Christ. On the con- 
servative side, see G. H. Box, The Virgin Birth of Jesus; T. 
J. Thorburn, Crit’l Exam. of the Evidence for the Doctr. 
of the V. B.; C. A. Briggs, Theol. Symbolics, pp. 52-60; V. 
Rose, Studies on the Gospels, ch. ii; Leonard Prestige, The 
V. B. of our Lord; Jas. Orr, The V. B. of Christ; and many 
others. Among German defenders of the fact may be men- 
tioned F. K. L. Steinmayer, 1873; B. Weiss, 1884; A. H. 
Cremer, 1893; Th. Zahn, 1893 and since; G. Wohlenberg, 1893; 
J. Hausleiter; Ph. Bachmann; and Gritzmacher. 

I40 


STANDPOINTS 141 


ural science constitute but a part; (b) that the event 
itself, being the taking of our nature by a preéxistent 
divine Person, is not correctly viewed as a case of 
human procreation, presumably subject in physical 
method to the universally observed law of such pro- 
creation ; but is a unique act of God, the phenomenal 
aspect of which is likely also to be unique. It is, 
of course, necessary that the event should be sup- 
ported by evidence; but the sufficiency of the evi- 
dence of the Virgin Birth cannot rightly be estim- 
ated if these premises are disregarded or rejected.? 

They are disregarded by Modernists under the 
influence of contrary presuppositions, which close 
their minds to the possibility, or at least the cred- 
ibility of the event—close them in a way that makes 
their claim to the “open mind,” and ascription to 
conservative believers of the ‘closed mind,’ a 
pathetic absurdity. 

(a) Their initial presupposition is that the birth 
of Jesus must have been governed by the laws of 
human procreation, which would be violated by the 
exclusion of human paternity. This is, of course, a 
naturalistic assumption, not at all susceptible of 
proof by natural science. 


2'This does not mean that the evidence which convinced 
the apostolic Church is all available to us. The New Testa- 
ment nowhere seeks to prove the Virgin Birth, and the Gos- 
pel narratives im re are but witnesses to established fact, 
written not for gainsayers but for believers. 


142 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


(b) Their second presupposition is that the Per- 
son Jesus Christ derived His being from human 
conception and birth, and was not preéxistent God. 
‘That is, they reject the doctrine of the Incarnation 
in substance, even while professing to accept it in 
terms. ‘That doctrine requires us to believe that the 
event of Bethlehem was the taking of human na- 
ture by the eternal, and therefore preéxistent, only- 
begotten Son of God. Modernism has developed 
another doctrine altogether, and only on the basis 
of a progressive interpretation which reverses the 
meaning of scriptural and ecclesiastical language can 
Modernists refute the general truth of Bishop Gore’s 
dictum, that “‘there are no believers in the Incarna- 
tion discoverable who are not believers in the Virgin 
Birth.” * A universal negative of this kind cannot, 
of course, be demonstrated, and there are excep- 
tions; but that wsually the two beliefs stand or fall 
together is abundantly verifiable in modern litera- 
Lure: . 

Of these presuppositions I give two examples. 
The late Dr. Sanday, in his article on “Jesus Christ” 
in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, and elsewhere, 
wrote as a believer in the fact of the Virgin Birth; 
but, as he candidly explains in his pamphlet, Bishop 
Gore’s Challenge to Criticism, pp. 21 ff., he came 
later to reject that fact, because he had come to be- 


3 Dissertations, p. 48. 


STANDPOINTS 143 


lieve that it was contrary to natural law, contra 
naturam. His explanations show that, while not - 
denying the power of God to work such a miracle, 
he believed it to be incredible that He should will 
to do so, on the ground that it would be “a breach 
of the physical order.” In brief, his loss of faith 
in the fact was due, not to any new study of the 
evidence, but to what for him was a new theoretical 
premise—one pertaining to the naturalistic phil- 
osophy, but lying, as many scientists admit, beyond 
the competence of science as such to establish. 
My second example is taken from Frederic 
Palmer’s The Virgin Birth. After naively saying 
that “the Virgin Birth is . . . in no way connected 
with the divinity of Jesus unless we regard that 
divinity as material,’ he writes with strange ob- 
liviousness of self-contradiction, “We do not in- 
deed venture to such length as to say that Christ 
is God, for this would involve the inconceivable as- 
sertion that God Almighty was once born and 
died.” * What this amounts to is that Professor 
Palmer approaches the question of the Virgin Birth 
from the standpoint of rejection of the central Chris- 
tian doctrine that Christ is very God. Naturally 
4Page 28. He seems to consider that to ascribe birth and 
death to one who is God is to ascribe beginning and end 
of being to Him, The eternal Son was born and died as 


touching the Manhood taken by Him, not as touching His 
Godhead. 


144 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


a negative result is inevitable, and his method of 
argument is made tortuous thereby. 

The Modernist attack on the fact of the Virgin 
Birth 1s not due to the emergence of new data, nor 
to any new light which they have brought to bear 
on the question. It is transparently due to presup- 
positions which beg the question at the outset, and 
which close the mind to the state of the question, to 
the value of the evidence, and to the rational sig- 
nificance of the fact in the history of God’s world. 


2. State of the Question 


All beliefs, whatever may have been their previous 
acceptance, are open at all times to fresh investiga- 
tion. In this sense no question can ever be closed. 
The interests of truth are paramount; and it is by 
repeated investigation, freely conducted, that Chris- 
tian tradition from time to time is purged by the 
overruling Spirit of unwarranted accretions. The 
error of our Modernist clergy does not lie in their 
plea for freedom in this direction. It lies in their 
utihzing the Church’s official ministry to attack the 
Church’s official doctrine; and my whole argument 
is in vain if it does not also show that Modernists do 
not reinvestigate such teachings as we are consider- 
ing in a manner consistent with likelihood of depend- 
able results. 


STATE OF THE QUESTION 145 


The belief in the fact of the Virgin Birth is an 
integral part of a broad and uninterrupted stream 
of tradition which, according to so radical a liberal 
as Adolf Harnack, who for a reason which I shall 
consider rejects the fact, “must be traced back to 
the Churches of Palestine, and must be ascribed 
to the first decades after the Resurrection.” * It 
emerges in the writings of St. Ignatius, IIo A.D., 
Aristides, about 125 A.p., and Justin Martyr, about 
150 A.D.; and it does so in terms which cannot be 
shown to be wholly traceable to the Gospel narra- 
tives. It emerges also in the Old Roman Creed, 
which according to Harnack was in use as early as 
150 A.D., and which according to another Liberal, 
Dr. Kattenbusch, dates back to 100 A.p. ‘There is 
no trace of orthodox dissent, and the only known 
rejectors of the Virgin Birth in the primitive age 
were the Ebionite rejectors of Christ’s divinity and 
the Gnostic docetists, to whom, of course, there 
could be no justifying reason for such a birth. 
That is, their anti-Christian standpoint explains their 
dissent. 

During the many centuries in which our doctrine 
has held its own among the bulk of Christian be- 
lievers, its truth has been repeatedly investigated 
and confirmed, with such methods of enquiry as 
each age has afforded and by intelligent writers. 


5 Date of the Acts, etc., p. 148. 


146 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


The modern period has brought to light no determin- 
ative data which have not been previously available, 
except such as confirm in general the text and 
authenticity of the Virgin Birth narratives. And 
what is most significant of all, perhaps, is the cir- 
cumstance that the sub-apostolic acceptance of the 
fact of the Virgin Birth embodied the belief of 
immediate listeners to the Apostles, who must have 
possessed more direct and reliable knowledge of the 
data bearing on the question than the most indus- 
trious scholars can hope now to recover. — 

I do not maintain for a moment that this general 
stream of tradition itself directly proves the fact 
of the Virgin Birth. My point is quite different. 
It is that a general state of belief reaching back 
uninterruptedly into the period when firsthand 
testimony for its confirmation or rebuttal was in all 
likelihood available has to be reckoned with, and 
cannot reasonably be declared false until proved to 
be so. It determines the state of the question, and 
places the burden of proof unmistakably on the 
shoulders of those who deny the Virgin Birth. 
Modernists who neglect to reckon with this tradi- 
tion, and fail to give adequate reason for its origin, 
if false, are not facing all the data. And in saying 
this I do not in the least depend upon any theory of 
ecclesiastical authority. 


THE EVIDENCE 147 


3. The Evidence 


The fact of the Virgin Birth, the literal reality 
of which has from within the apostolic age been 
generally held to be part of the Christian faith, is 
twofold: that Jesus Christ was conceived and born 
of the Virgin Mary, without carnal intercourse; and 
that this was brought about by the Holy Spirit. It 
has always seemed to Christians to be a suitable 
method of God’s entrance into human history; but 
this conviction did not originate the belief in the 
fact, and could not have justified its adoption, if it 
had not been based upon sufficient evidence—suffi- 
cient in the light of all pertinent considerations. If 
it had been a sheer portent, without rational occa- 
sion and significance, for example, sufficient evidence 
would have meant an overwhelming evidence such 
as we can expect to find for no event of ancient 
history. But it was not an irrational portent. In 
the light of what Christians had learned as to the 
divine Person of Christ, and therefore as to the 
significance of His being born in time at all, it was 
the manner and sign of the taking of our nature 
by the eternal, preéxistent, Son of God. In that 
light they estimated the evidence and were convinced 
by it. 

That evidence probably reached an inner circle 


148 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


of Christians independently of the related Gospel 
narratives, and before they were published. But 
the narratives of our Lord’s human birth in the 
first and third Gospels, contain the main, the only 
direct and explicit, evidence, whether for or against 
the fact of His Virgin Birth, that is now available 
to those who would freshly examine the subject. 
These Gospels alone of extant first century records 
are concerned to tell of our Lord’s early life; they 
both bear clear witness to the Virgin Birth; there 
is no explicit witness to the contrary; and the story 
of the Virgin Birth thus publicly given to Christians 
seems to have provoked no controversy in the 
Church, although some were living who were in a 
position to judge on independent grounds whether 
the story was true or not. Thus these two narra- 
tives contain the sum of directly determinative data; 
and their ready acceptance by the presumably well- 
informed apostolic Church confirms the belief that 
they are dependable sources for us. 

The authenticity and internal integrity, as well as 
the substantial correctness of the received text, of 
both narratives have been fully established on 
critical grounds by the combined labours of many 
competent scholars. It is also established, (a) that 
both Gospels were written within the apostolic age, 
the tendency of scholars being to push the dates of 
their publication backward rather than forward; 


_ THE EVIDENCE 149 


(b) that the distinctively archaic elements of the 
narratives indicate use by the Gospel writers of 
preexisting material, whether oral or written, seem- 
ingly reflecting the conservative Jewish atmosphere 
of the holy family; (c) that while not proved to be 
mutually contradictory, the narratives are distinctly 
independent, complementary and mutually corro- 
borative as to the main fact of the Virgin Birth; 
(d) that the standpoint of the story in the first 
Gospel is that of Joseph, in the third Gospel that 
of Mary, suggesting that the two narratives came 
ultimately from these firsthand witnesses. To this 
must be added the calm sobriety and spiritual ele- 
vation of the stories, absolutely inconsistent with 
any other motive than that of responsible effort to 
tell the truth. It remains for openminded scholars 
either to acknowledge the fact attested by these 
narratives or to bring forward sufficient indirect 
evidence to the contrary—not forgetting that the 
early and firm establishment of the traditional belief 
needs explanation. 

This evidence for the Virgin Birth seems to be 
confirmed by a phrase in the fourth Gospel. What- 
ever may have been the authorship of this Gospel, 
and its exactitude in reporting after many years the 
precise words of Christ, the trend of criticism 1s 
to establish the reliable and firsthand nature of the 
writer’s knowledge, and his competence as witness 


150 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


of established Christian belief towards the end of 
the apostolic age. He was undoubtedly acquainted 
with the story of the Virgin Birth; and in view of 
his quietly correcting the Synoptic Gospels in several 
instances, he would have been likely to correct them 
in SO serious a matter as this, if he had not believed 
the Virgin Birth to be a fact. His failure to do so, 
therefore, seems significant. 

Instead of correcting them, he writes of the new 
birth of the children of God in terms obviously 
descriptive of a supernatural virgin birth, “Who 
were born not of bloods, nor of the will of the flesh, 
nor of the will of a man, but of God.” The trans- 
lation in our English versions, it is to be observed, 
does not bring out the closeness of the allusion to 
virgin birth—an allusion utterly without explanation 
unless the writer was intentionally likening the re- 
generation of Christians to the supernatural method 
of Christ’s own human birth. “Not of bloods” 
(plural), that is not by union of the blood of two 
parents; “nor by the will of the flesh,” that is not 
by fleshly procreative act; “nor by the will of a 
man’’ (the Greek word for man, andros, designates 
not a human being in general, but a male), that is 
not by paternal human begetting; “but of God,” that 
is by divine intervention. 


6 St. John 1. 13. 


OBJECTIONS 151 


4. Objections 


For reasons that will be apparent as we go on, 
a number of data is discoverable in the Gospels 
which require explanation to harmonize them with 
the fact of the Virgin Birth. These are marshalled 
by certain objectors as so many ‘“‘evidences”’ against 
that fact, and the conclusion is deduced that the 
view which makes Joseph the natural father of Jesus 
“may ... claim for it more extensive Scriptural 
authority.” * This is hopelessly untrue. The data 
requiring explanation do not constitute “evidences” 
against the Virgin Birth unless insusceptible of 
reasonable explanation in harmony therewith. It 
will be my task to show that they are susceptible 
of such explanation, and therefore that against the 
fact of the Virgin Birth there can be found in the 
New Testament no “evidence,” in the accepted 
sense of that word, either direct or indirect: The 
only real evidence available and pertinent supports 
the fact. 

(1) The silence as to the Virgin Birth of all 
New Testament writers, except the authors of the 
two Gospel narratives, is said to afford evidence 
that they knew nothing of that miracle, and cer- 
tainly to prove that the Virgin Birth was not em- 


7F, Palmer, op. cit., pp. 15-10. 


152 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


ployed in primitive Gospel preaching as basis of 
belief in Christ’s divine Person. 

That it was not the original basis of belief in 
Christ is certainly true; and, as Bishop Gore has 
recently insisted, it may not rightly be used as such 
basis now. In that aspect the Virgin Birth is 
“secondary,” as he says—a point to which I shall 
return. But it is surely not essential to the Virgin 
Birth being a fact that it should also be the basis of 
belief in Christ and should have a primary place in 
Christian apologetic. Its not being thus pushed for- 
ward in the first preaching, therefore, affords no 
evidence whatever against its reality. To this day, 
even in sermons of the most convinced believers in 
the fact, the subject is not often discussed or re- 
ferred to, except when unbelieving attacks provoke 
defensive argument. And it is the Modernist attack 
that explains the present prominence of the subject. 

The argument from silence is widely recognized 
to be of no evidential value, unless convincing 
reasons can be given to prove that those who were 
silent must have referred to the Virgin Birth, 1f 
they were aware of it. No such reasons are here 
available. The other historical writings begin 
with our Lord’s public ministry or with the estab- 
lishment of the Church, and therefore have no 
natural place for the story. St. Mark advertises his 
starting point as “the beginning of the Gospel of 


OBJECTIONS 153 


Jesus Christ,’ meaning the evangel or public preach- 
ing of the good news. The fourth Gospel begins 
at the same point, and is generally recognized to be 
supplementary to the others, not repeating their 
narratives without need. But, as already shown, it 
does apparently make one indirect allusion to the 
Virgin Birth. St. Paul’s Epistles are silent not only 
as to the Virgin Birth but as to nearly all of our 
Lord’s earthly life. Does this mean that he was 
ignorant of it all? The only reason that would 
have necessitated reference to the Virgin Birth, sup- 
posing the silent writers were aware of it, is the 
existence of controversy concerning it; and of such 
controversy there is no trace. 

It is of course quite possible that the earliest books 
of the New Testament were written in ignorance 
of the Virgin Birth, that is, before its publication. 
All that this would prove is that such publication 
was delayed—xnot at all that the story was contrary 
to fact. That the publication was delayed until 
some time after the establishment of the Christian 
Church seems certain to many scholars. And the 
delay was wise. The story could only provoke 
scandalous misconstruction, unless its recipients had 
come to understand that Christ’s birth in any case 
was the entrance into human history of a preéxist- 
ent heavenly Person. Only from such a standpoint 
would the story be taken seriously and accepted as 


154 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


credible. But this delay, and the previous ignorance 
involved, invalidates the misleading argument that 
the New Testament supports two traditions, the 
earlier one making Joseph the begetter of Jesus, and 
the later one asserting the Virgin Birth; and that 
it justifies our choice of either one.® What it 
really shows is that an earlier and ignorant assump- 
tion—not tradition—was corrected, when this could 
safely be done, by those in a position to know the 
facts. It is the wisely delayed story of the well- 
informed, rather than the previous natural although 
mistaken assumption of the ignorant, that has the 
support of the New Testament. 

(2) This delay in publication, and this previous 
ignorance of the facts outside the holy family, also 
wholly nullifies the alleged evidential force of the 
passages in the Gospels in which Jesus is referred 
to as the son of Joseph, and Joseph is designated as 
his father and parent.? The Gospel writers show 
their truthfulness in faithfully reproducing the 
language employed during our Lord’s life, usually 
without corrective phrase. So they report the words 
referred to without thereby being committed to 
acceptance of their alleged implication. Moreover, 


8 Creeds and Loyalty, p. 63. 
° Ch Xa) /Stuibuke ‘ty. 227° St.) John 4, 4stivi, 42° (0) ot 
Luke ii, 48: (c) St. Luke ii, 27, 41. 


OBJECTIONS 155 


Jesus was the adopted son of Joseph, even though 
not begotten of him, and established custom would 
cause this relationship to be indicated by such terms 
as have been mentioned. And this applies within 
the family. In speaking to Jesus, His mother 
would inevitably refer to Joseph as ‘Thy father’: 
and St. Luke naturally speaks of Joseph and Mary 
as “His parents.” Why, in view of his clear ac- 
count of the Virgin Birth elsewhere, should he have 
stopped to explain that Joseph was only foster- 
father, “parent” in a merely putative and legal 
sense? 

(3) The fact that Christ’s mother showed amaze- 
ment at words and doings of her Son which would 
have seemed justified to her, if she had realized who 
and what He was,?° is said to show that she could 
not have been aware of His being born of her with- 
out earthly paternity. Two simple considerations 
fully meet this objection. Modernists themselves 
supply one of them when they insist that the fact 
of the Virgin Birth, if fact, could not of itself 
establish the doctrine of Christ’s divine Person. If 
it does not do so for modern intellectuals, why 
should it have done so for that unsophisticated 
Maiden? The second consideration is that the 
language by which the Angel is reported to have 


10 St. Luke ii, 33, 48-50. 


156 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


announced to Mary her high privilege contains no 
such exposition of the holy Child’s Person as would 
prepare her for what she was subsequently to hear 
and witness. He gave her no Christological lecture. 
How could her untrained mind have obtained ab 
imitio the discerning standpoint which the Apostles 
were unable to gain until after the Resurrection 
and the Holy Spirit’s descent? Of course, she 
wondered! 

(4) Two of our Cambridge Professors raise the 
remarkable objection that St. Paul’s doctrine of 
Christ’s preéxistence in heaven before His earthly 
life is “incompatible with the birth narratives in 
Matthew and Luke. In these He comes into being 
(italics mine) through union of the Holy Spirit 
and His virgin mother.’’*4_ The question arises: 
In what terms does either of the Virgin Birth nar- 
ratives describe Christ’s birth as His coming into 
being? I can find no trace therein, whether explicit 
or implicit, of any assertion or denial which bears 
specifically on the point. The only basis I can 
imagine for the argument is the assumption that 
to be conceived and born at all is equivalent to 
coming into being, whatever may be the rank in 
being of the person concerned. Such an assump- 
tion precludes acceptance of the Christian doctrine 
of the Incarnation. It also puts St. Paul at issue 


11 Creeds and Loyalty, pp. 61, 78. 


OBJECTIONS 157 


with himself, for he affirms both the preéxistence 
of Christ and His being born of a woman.”” 

(5) The alleged derivation of the story from 
pagan myth is incredible. It is based on analogies 
which on scrutiny reveal violent contrasts both of 
contents and between foulness and purity. More- 
over, the primitive Christians abhorred pagan myth- 
ology. The narratives are obviously Jewish in 
source, and no Jewish myth can be found that could 
have suggested them. Finally, they were produced 
too soon after the event to be due to Christian myth- 
forming, a thing also quite foreign to early Christian 
tendencies. 

(6) Harnack, the great Liberal, rejects the myth 
theory, but explains the origin of the story as due to 
belief in the divine sonship of Christ, which led 
Christians to find a prediction of His Virgin Birth 
in Isaiah’s prophecy that a young woman should 
bring forth a son who should be called Emmanuel, 
the Hebrew for “young woman” being translated 
“virgin” in the Greek version used by early 
Christians.*? 

The word in question does not itself mean 
“virgin,” although thus applicable; and the inter- 
pretation in the first Gospel cannot be established 
on that ground. But was it really erroneous? 


12 Phil. ii, 6-7; Gal. iv, 4. 
13 Hist. of Dogma, vol. I, p. Ioon. 


158 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


There are plausible reasons for thinking that it was 
not. But I have no space to discuss the question, 
nor is it necessary in determining the fact of the 
Virgin Birth. Granting for argument’s sake that 
it was erroneous, the Gospel writer’s exegetical in- 
expertness affords no evidence that his acquaintance 
with the manner of Christ’s birth was at fault. In- 
asmuch as the passage cited had not previously been 
taken as messianic at all, it appears far more likely 
that his previous knowledge of the fact of the Virgin 
Birth explains his then novel interpretation of 
Isaiah than that his belief in the fact of such birth 
was due to the interpretation in question. His 
mistaken exegesis, if it was mistaken, affords no 
evidence against his competence as witness to a 
comparatively recent fact. 

(7) It is objected that the genealogies given in 
connection with the birth narratives, in spite of the 
adjustment of certain phrases in them to agree 
with these narratives, trace our Lord’s descent from 
David through Joseph, and therefore imply in their 
whole construction that Joseph begat Jesus, a fact 
actually asserted in certain ancient manuscripts of 
the first Gospel. 

Answering the last point first, the accepted text 
of St. Matthew i. 16 has uncial and other manu- 
script support which in textual criticism of the 
rest of the New Testament is taken by experts to 


OBJECTIONS 159 


be decisive. The exceptions are not only excep- 
tions, but seem to be due to alterations made with 
purpose. ‘There is no space here for details.‘* But 
it is significant that the altered readings retain the 
mention of Mary the Virgin. Why this unusual 
mention of the mother, with her being described as 
“the Virgin’? It is also to be noted that in the 
Matthzan genealogy the word “begat”’ is used con- 
ventionally for “was legally succeeded by.” The 
proof of this is that in several cases a man is said 
to have begotten one who was really not his son, 
but either a more remote descendant or his nephew. 

The obvious purpose of the genealogies was to 
show that Jesus was heir of David’s royal line. 
Such succession was necessarily through a male line, 
in this case through Joseph, of whom Christ was 
legal successor whether begotten of him or not. 
That Mary was also of Davidic ancestry was be- 
lieved in the early Church, but whether rightly or 
not does not bear on the question as to whether Jesus 
was the heir of David. That was determined by 
the status of his foster-father, which the genealogies 
are concerned to show. Accordingly, the genealo- 
gies are rightly to be regarded as consistent with 
the Virgin Birth narrative in structure as well as 


14 Good treatments of this text occur in W. C. Allen’s Com- 
mentary, in loc. (Internat. Crit’?l Commentaries); and F. C. 
Burkitt’s Evangelion da Mapharreshe, vol. II, pp. 258 ff. 


160 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


in their turns of phrase explicitly agreeing with it. 

(8) The general accuracy of St. Luke as histo- 
rian has been successfully vindicated against attack; 
but the objection is made that he leaves no room 
for the events connected with our Lord’s infancy 
as given by the first Gospel, the flight to Egypt, etc. 
From the nature of the case, the additional data 
needed for compiling a harmony of the two Gospels 
in this direction are no longer available. The prob- 
lems of reconciliation therefore cannot be met ex- 
cept conjecturally. But St. Luke’s habit elsewhere 
of giving events in rapid succession without men- 
tion of intervals of time between them appears to 
open up reasonable possibilities of reconciliation.1® 
It is clear in any case that our inability to construct 
a complete harmony of the two Gospels in their 
early chapters affords no evidence of the falsity of 
their accounts of the Virgin Birth, for between these 
accounts at least no shadow of contradiction appears. 

(9) Finally, there is the objection, ostensibly 
based upon scientific grounds, that such an event as 
the Virgin Birth is contra-naturam, as the late Dr. 
Sanday put it, a contradiction of natural law, and too 
incredible to be established by the testimony upon 
which the traditional belief rests. 

As I have shown elsewhere that science does not 


16 Was Christ Born at Bethlehem? by Sir Wm. Ramsay 
is very helpful. 


os 


OBJECTIONS 161 


at all determine the possibility or credibility of mir- 
acles, especially when they have an intelligible place 
in the divine drama at large, I need not add much 
at this point. That the Virgin Birth does have sig- 
nificant relatedness to history at large is sufficiently 
shown elsewhere. The only plausible reason for 
regarding it as especially contrary to nature is the 
supposed violence of its innovation upon the uni- 
versally observed method of human procreation. 
An obvious answer, already given elsewhere, is that 
our Lord’s birth was not an instance of human pro- 
creation at all, but was the taking of our nature 
by a preéxistent divine Person. That such an event 
would conform in all respects to the law of human 
procreation is neither demonstrable nor likely; and 
that its nonconformity to such law is a “violation” 
thereof is certainly untrue, for the event is other 
than those to which the law in question properly 
applies. ? 

Then as to the violence which a virgin birth is 
said to do to the natural order, this is wrongly esti- 
mated. Parthenogenesis, although unknown in hu- 
man procreation, is a well established phenomenon 
in certain lower species. That is, it is not contrary 
to the natural order at large. What nature itself 
does in enabling single organisms to bring forth 
progeny without male assistance, the operation of 
the Holy Spirit did in enabling the blessed Mary to 


162 | THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


conceive without male action. That is, the physical 
miracle was limited to supplementing her virgin- 
power that she might supply to the preéxistent Son 
of God the nature of her race. In this no violence 
was done to nature; but a manner of Incarnation 
was adopted which was brought as closely into line 
with nature’s normal working as was fitting in view 
of the unique character and purpose of the mystery 
—a critical shifting of scenery in God’s world- 
drama. 

I think that I have reckoned sufficiently with 
modern objections to the Virgin Birth to make it 
clear that, whatever incidental problems they may 
raise, they furnish not a particle of “evidence’’ 
against its being a fact. All the evidence is for the 
fact, and it is enough to convince those whose minds 
have not been closed by question-begging presup- 
positions. 


5. Importance 


Modernists tell us that, even if the Virgin Birth 
be a fact, its importance is not such as to justify its 
being regarded as an article of faith necessary to 
be accepted by loyal Christians. Confessedly it was 
not part of the original preaching of the Apostles, 
and was not made by them a basis of belief in the 
Incarnation. Why then, it is asked, do conserva- 


IMPORTANCE 163 


tives show such alarm at its denial? What matters 
our opinion as to the Virgin Birth, so long as we 
are loyal to Jesus Christ? Why emphasize the fact 
in question so insistently? Is not Bishop Gore 
right in calling the fact “secondary?” 

It is well to point out first that when Bishop Gore 
called the fact “secondary” he did not mean un- 
important. We have his testimony to the contrary. 
He obviously had its apologetical relation in view. 
It is “secondary’’ as not being the basis of belief in 
Christ; but is important, none the less, for various 
reasons. Some of these reasons ought to be per- 
ceived even by the Modernists, while others become 
especially apparent when the fact and significance of 
the Virgin Birth are accepted and understood. The 
present emphasis by conservatives does not represent 
disproportion of view, but is plainly due to Modern- 
ist attacks. The subject is not normally dwelt upon 
to any great extent, even by the most convinced be- 
lievers in the fact and its importance. It is not 
often preached about. 

(a) Modernists are inconsistent in disparaging 
its importance; ** for if it is so unimportant as they 


16 Professor Dun of Cambridge, Creeds and Loyalty, p. 68, 
says of those who believe that there is “overwhelming his- 
torical evidence for the Virgin Birth” that they “must adjust 
their whole view of life to include that fact.’ “And the pre- 
sumption would be that so exceptional event... must pos- 
sess a like exceptional significance.’ Again on p. 69, “It is 


164 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


claim, why are they so deeply concerned with it? 
Why do they ransack the New Testament for con- 
trary evidence, and proceed to assail the Church for 
retaining it in the Creed, at the obvious cost of un- 
settling many believers and saddening those whom 
God has not willed to be sad? They did not have 
to do this. If they had simply ignored the subject 
in their preaching and writing they would have in- 
curred no difficulty; and their avowed belief in the 
right of symbolical interpretation would have served 
to prevent disturbance of their own consciences. 

(b) They would no doubt answer that others are 
troubled, and that they are contending for the relief 
of consciences of earnest Christians. Alas, who 
troubled these others by public attack on the Virgin 
Birth, unless the Liberals and Modernists of our 
day? 

(c) If it is replied that truth is paramount, and 
that truth-seeking, regardless of mind-closing dog- 
ma, is involved, then why is the truth as to the Vir- 
gin Birth decried as unimportant? It is just be- 
cause truth is paramount that conservative believers 
defend what they have reason to believe is true as 
against attack. A man’s faith determines his prac- 
tical ideals and actions. Moreover, in view of the 


an event which will be believed or doubted or disbelieved 
according to the whole view of things with which the evidence 
is approached.” Surely such an event is not rightly treated 
as unimportant. 


IMPORTANCE 165 


Modernist emphasis upon scientific scholarship, 
what scientific justification is there for treating the 
method of the Incarnation as a fact of negligible im- 
portance? Does any competent scientist thus treat 
even the smallest fact incidental to his investigation 
of great matters? Modernists acknowledge the 
epoch-making importance of the birth of Christ. Is 
it scientific scholarship that leads them to disparage 
the importance of the circumstances of so great an 
event? Is not their disparagement, in view of their 
great labour in attack on the Virgin Birth, a bit in- 
consistent ? 

(d) The conservative believer has sound reasons 
for his belief in the importance of the Virgin Birth. 
Having sufficient evidence for it, he perceives that 
it is God’s chosen method of sending His Son into 
the world; and he is unable to think that such 
choice has no meaning and no importance. He be- 
lieves in divine wisdom. 

(e) This is confirmed by the fitness of such a 
method of Incarnation—a method unforeseen of 
men, and therefore precluding invention by its nar- 
rators; but one which, once made known, was per- 
ceived to be convenient. The Incarnation was pre- 
eminently God’s act. Therefore, the birth through 
which it came to pass was not left to human con- 
tingencies, to the will of a man, but was accom- 
plished specifically by God’s Holy Spirit. This 


166 THE VIRGIN BIRTH 


method also fittingly signalized the new start, the 
break with previous human sin, which the Incarna- 
tion represents. In short the Virgin Birth has the 
importance of manifesting the wisdom of God ina 
great act. . 

(f) Once established as fact, the Virgin Birth 
constitutes the concrete picture of the Incarnation, 
the picture by which human imagination is en- 
abled to retain it graphically in mind. This affords 
needed help to the mass of believers in attaining a 
vital apprehension of the mystery. For it is a law 
of human psychology that beliefs in abstract prop- 
ositions, if they are not embodied in appropriate 
concrete facts, and thus made imaginable, cannot 
obtain effective and abiding hold upon human minds 
in general. Naturally, therefore, to throw doubt 
upon the pictorial form in which the fact of the In- 
carnation has been transmitted, a form attested by 
Scripture as of divine ordering, is viewed with 
alarm by believers, as tending to weaken faith in the 
Incarnation. 

(g) That doubt as to the Virgin Birth does 
weaken this faith is a commonly observed fact. 
Those who reject a real Virgin Birth are found 
sooner or later to lose hold on the doctrine of the 
Incarnation itself, ending either in denial or in mod- 
ifying significantly its scriptural and historical con- 
tent. This has been shown elsewhere. It is quite 


IMPORTANCE 167 


true that the knowledge of the fact was not needed 
to create or establish apostolic belief in Christ’s 
divine Person, for the primitive Church had peculiar 
advantages in rightly apprehending Him. But for 
subsequent generations the “sign” of the Virgin 
Birth, published before the Apostles passed away, 
became an important confirmatory evidence that the 
birth of Jesus was the coming of the preéxistent 
Son of God into the world—not an instance simply 
of human procreation. 

(h) To-day belief in the Virgin Birth gains new 
importance from the reasons which really explain 
its rejection. It is rejected not because of any new 
data against it, not because of superior scholarship 
in those who reject it, but because of question- 
begging presuppositions—naturalism and a reduced 
Christology. So the battle is one of radically op- 
posed standpoints, the Modernist and the historically 
Christian; and the fact of the Virgin Birth is for 
the moment of peculiar importance as a Christian 
citadel which is under immediate attack. 


CHAPTER XVI 
THE BODILY RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 
1. The Christian Doctrine 


THE doctrine on this subject that has always been 
preserved in the Church as an integral part of the 
Christian faith—indeed as a major premise of Chris- 
tian apologetic—requires two affirmations: (a) that 
Christ rose from the dead in the body wherein He 
died; (>) that His body underwent a great change. 
St. Paul’s description of our resurrection implies 
that from having been a psychical body, under the 
rule of the animal soul, it became a pnueumatical 
body, under the control of the higher soul or spirit. 
St. Paul’s description is of course partial; but it 
makes clear the essential element in the change, 
which is a putting on of incorruption and immortal- 
ity, and an equipment of the body for the functions 
of the future life. 

The creeds simply affirm with regard to Christ’s 
Resurrection that “the third day He rose again from 
the dead,” this being the initial fact, unreserved ac- 


ceptance of which leads men’s minds on to full ac- 
168 


MODERN REACTION 169 


knowledgment of the whole mystery. In saying 
“the third day,” the creeds indicate an event that 
occurred many hours after He was dead; and in 
adding, “He rose again from the dead,” it describes 
this event as His recovery from the state of death 
in which during those hours He lay in the tomb. 
The opinion that Christ’s personality survived the 
shock of death, and lives on in the other world, 
plainly does not, without important enlargement, 
measure up to acceptance of this affirmation. On the 
other hand, the context of “pious opinion’ which has 
been gathered around this article, and around that 
which concerns our own resurrection, is not part 
of the faith which loyal Christians must accept. It 
stands or falls on its merits, and has undergone much 
change. Failure to realize this has led Modernists 
into very gross caricature of the Catholic doctrine; 
and a correction of their misconstructions, suff- 
ciently weighed, will go far to reduce the plausibility 
of their arguments in this subject. 


2. Modern Reaction 


As with the Virgin Birth so here, the modern 
attacks on the bodily Resurrection of Christ have 
been due to an opposition of standpoints, not to 
better scholarship. There is an immense amount of 
high scholarship enlisted in behalf of the Christian 


170 BODILY RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 


doctrine. It is very generally the case that those 
who reject the fact of bodily resurrection approach 
the question with the presuppositions which account 
in most instances for rejection of the Virgin Birth: 
that of naturalism, and that of reduced Christology. 
To these may be added a third, a Manichzan or 
semi-Manichzan belief in the essential unfitness of 
matter for the spiritual functions and self-expression 
of the other world. For Naturalism the event in 
question is impossible, and a negative conclusion is 
inevitable regardless of any alleged evidence. And 
if Christ was not truly divine in the ancient Chris- 
tian sense of that term, His recovery from bodily 
death seems unlikely, incredible, and the apostolic 
assertion that He could not be holden of death ? will 
either be dismissed or given an interpretation con- 
trary to its apostolic meaning. If matter is intrinsi- 
cally unfitted for the functioning of the life to come, 
the resurrection of the body is of course incredible. 

With such presuppositions men have necessarily 
either rejected the evidence of those who testified 
to the empty tomb and to Christ’s bodily manifesta- 
tions to His disciples or have sought to explain the 
facts attested on other grounds than that of a true 

1Qne of the best recent treatises is W. J. Sparrow Simp- 
son’s The Resurrection and Modern Thought. J have dis- 
cussed the subject in The Passion and Exaltation of Christ, 
chs. vi-viii. 

2 Acts ii, 24. 


MATTER AND SPIRIT 17 


bodily resurrection. It is out of question for me to 
treat in this volume of the many forms of attack and 
substitutionary theories that have emerged. One 
after another they have been adequately reckoned 
with and sufficiently answered by Christian scholars, 
who have incidentally relieved the doctrine of crudi- 
ties born of extraneous opinion and utilized by as- 
sailants to discredit the real doctrine at issue. The 
latest explanation of assailants is the so-called 
psychic theory, that the appearances were spiritistic 
materializations given to assure the Apostles that 
their Master was living on in the spirit world. 
Like the “telegram-from-heaven” theory which pre- 
ceded it, this presupposes deception, for the words 
of the risen one plainly imply His possession of flesh 
and bones.* It was assertion of His bodily resur- 
rection that constituted the primary basis in apos- 
tolic preaching of their argument for His Person. 
It is also clear that no spiritistic phenomena known 
to history even approximate those described in con- 
nection with the Resurrection. 


3. Matter and Spirit 


That in our present fallen state the flesh always 
lusteth contrary to the spirit * is a fact of daily ex- 


3 St. Luke xxiv, 39-43. 
4 Gal. v, 17, 


172 BODILY RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 


perience. But, as St. Paul points out, this is a pass- 
ing subjection to vanity which is to end in “redemp- 
tion of the body.’ ® And St. Paul’s contrast be- 
tween the natural body (the Greek is psychic or 
soul body) and the spiritual body® is not one of 
substance as between matter and spirit. It is of 
subjection, on the one hand, to the carnal or animal 
soul, and, on the other hand, to the higher spirit. 
If he says that flesh and blood cannot inherit (they 
cannot of their native power), he goes right on to 
say that by a change at the last trump this mortal 
will put on immortality.’ Modernists quote the 
“cannot” and fail to reckon with what follows. 
What native power cannot do a change from above 
is said to bring about. 

The Christian doctrine does not at all involve a 
crude resuscitation of flesh in the sense of restora- 
tion to its previous state and limitations, but its 
emancipation from limitations, suitable for the stage 
of probation although to be transcended hereafter as 
unsuitable for the life in glory. We should not con- 
fuse two uses of the word “flesh”: that which 
simply designates the lower part of our nature; and 
that which has reference to its present carnal limi- 


5 Rom. viii, 20-23. 
6] Cor. xv, 44. 
71 Cor. xv, 50 ff. 


MATTER AND SPIRIT 173 


tations. It is in the first sense, of course, that the 
risen Lord drew attention to His flesh. 

Modernist science is not invariably the most mod- 
ern. The tendency of science to-day is to reduce 
matter in ultimate analysis to electrical phenomena. 
This theory is too recent for its bearing on our sub- 
ject to be fully developed. But plainly, if it is true, 
it reduces to ineptitude much current argument as 
to the impossibility that glorified spirits should find 
use for material bodies. We have to remember 
that in this world our use of matter is its use by 
spirits; and if in our present weakness we can to a 
degree subject it to our spiritual ends, why should 
the enhancement of spiritual power promised to 
faithful servants of Christ deprive them of ability to 
subject and use the body? ® 

I need not proceed further on these lines. It is 
sufficient to remind my readers that as with the 
Virgin Birth this controversy is a battle between 
standpoints; and that the presuppositions that ex- 
plain the Modernist rejection of our Lord’s bodily 
Resurrection are not defensible on either scientific 
or Christian grounds. Much might be added, if I 
had space, on the wider bearings and relations of 


8 Which is most materialistic, to think of the body as 
“too much for” the spirit to handle, as moderns are apt to do, 
or to believe that the perfected spirit can master and use the 
body for its higher ends? Surely the former. 


174 BODILY RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 


the bodily Resurrection to the world drama at large 
and to other Christian doctrines, relations that add 
greatly to the credibility of the doctrine. The 
habit of viewing the Resurrection exclusively as an 
evidential miracle necessarily weakens the hold of 
many on its reality. 


THE END 


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